The word extreme is usually attached to pastimes such as snowboarding and base jumping but hold on to your felt tips, a puzzling new craze dubbed extreme dot-to-dot is gripping the nation.
With colouring-in now considered an established hobby for many British adults, it was only a matter of time before publishers came up with a new iteration. On Wednesday, high street stationer WH Smith toasted bumper sales of extreme dot-to-dot and “querkles” – a modern take on colour by numbers.
Demand for what WH Smith calls colour therapy books has been propping up book sales at the retailer since last spring. Titles such as Enchanted Forest by Johanna Basford and and Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom are still riding high in the Amazon UK bestseller list, where reviewers swap handy tips on which are the best pens and pencils to use and how to best colour over the centre of a double page spread.
“In the last couple of months two other activity books have taken off – extreme dot-to-dot and a thing called querkle, which is extreme colour by numbers,” said Stephen Clarke, the WH Smith chief executive. “It has had a big impact on our book sales and we are still seeing it performing really strongly.”
Rather than reaching for a glass of wine at the end of the day, these wholesome pursuits are often touted as an antidote to stress. Colouring books make up 70% of WH Smith’s sales of “adult activity” books but extreme dot-to-dot and querkles are the fastest growing new puzzle genres. The retailer said that at times it has struggled to keep up with demand and in some cases it has rationed stocks as they kept selling out.
For a tenner you can pick up Gareth Moore’s Ultimate Dot to Dot. The book comes with the promise of “over 30,000 dots” to join, although the images – which include a pharaoh’s death mask, the Taj Mahal and a skull – look more like the basis of a psychiatric evaluation.
One Rorschach-esque picture in Moore’s book has more than 1,700 dots to join. The book comes with encouraging instructions advising users to “start at number 1” and “don’t worry if you make a mistake”. However, its author adds the irreverent advice that you could always “start anywhere you like and the fill in the bits you missed later”.
