 "If colouring books can help ease stress, such books may just be the perfect thing to slip into your carry-on before you squeeze into coach Photo: istock")
Forget coffee in the lobby and chocolates at turndown. Colouring books for grown-ups — where the illustrations are inspired by travel, fashion and champagne wishes — are among the latest amenities being offered at hotels around the world.
Over the last year, Morgans Hotel Group has given guests “Morgans State of Mind” colouring books with pictures influenced by its boutique hotels in Miami, San Francisco, Istanbul and London. W Hotels gave colouring books featuring preferred cocktails of former presidents to guests who booked a certain type of suite. Yotel New York, part of the affordable Yotel chain, began selling crayons and colouring book pages that call to mind the Big Apple. And, the Four Seasons Hotel Austin in Texas started allowing guests to request colouring book pages and crayons at the front desk and offering groups an “Inspiration Station” stocked with crayons and colouring pages of mandalas.
Add to that dozens of new travel colouring books for adults that aim to, ahem, draw people out of their smartphones and transport them, for about the cost of Wi-Fi on an airplane, to places like London, Cuba, New York and Tokyo. Colouring books for grown-ups emerged as a fad early last year and by November Publishers Weekly had declared, “It is hard to find a publisher that hasn’t entered the adult colouring book market.” Today, there are colouring books for practically any interest or luminary, be it “The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Coloring Book: A Tribute to the Always Colorful and Often Inspiring Life of the Supreme Court Justice Known as RBG,” “The Official ‘A Game of Thrones’ Coloring Book” or the “Colour Me Good James Franco Coloring Book.” And books like “Release Your Anger: An Adult Coloring Book with 40 Swear Words to Color and Relax,” along with other titles not fit for a family newspaper, continue to be Amazon.com best-sellers.
However, unlike other regressive activities that adults have engaged in, such as watching the Twilight films and reading Harry Potter books, the colouring book trend is all about the cultivation of calm; the blithe notion that one can eclipse stress with a crayon (or a sharp coloured pencil, as the case may be).
In April, Morgans Hotel Group began offering guests a limited-edition “Mindfulness Coloring Book” with images inspired by the company’s hotels, including a couple in a bubble bath clinking glasses of champagne in a guest room at the Royalton New York.
“Colouring is believed to contribute to wellness, quietness and mindfulness — just like meditation does,” Morgans said in May on Back of House, its lifestyle website.
Hotels are not, however, the only travel companies to have pounced on the trend. In March, the travel publisher Lonely Planet rolled out “The Ultimate Travel Coloring Book” for adults, a bucket list of places, including the Temple of Angkor in Cambodia and the Taj Mahal in India (about $13 on Amazon). The “Adult Coloring Books” series from Little, Brown and Company, introduced last year, features images that call to mind major cities in colouring books with titles such as “Secret Paris,” “Secret Tokyo” and “Secret New York,” all of which are not-so-subtly subtitled “Color Your Way to Calm” (about $11 each on Amazon). That last one has drawings of Central Park, taxis, brownstones, the Empire State Building and the Chelsea flower district.
While Little, Brown may be one of the biggest publishers to chase the fad, there are travel colouring books for a variety of niches. If they can help ease stress, such books may just be the perfect thing to slip into your carry-on before you squeeze into coach.
© 2016 The New York Times
