Introduction
Coloring books for adults can feel like a recent idea, but people have been coloring printed pictures for more than 250 years. Here's a short history, from hand-colored prints to the printable pages you can download today.
The Early Beginnings
Picture books for learning
Johann Amos Comenius's Orbis Pictus (1658) is often called the first picture book for children. It taught Latin vocabulary alongside engravings of everyday things. It wasn't made to be colored, but it showed how pictures could help people learn.
The first coloring books
One of the earliest known coloring books was made for adults. Around 1760, the London publisher Robert Sayer printed The Florist, 60 flower engravings with instructions for painting each one in its natural colors.
Coloring books for children became popular in the late 1800s. Around 1879, the New York publisher McLoughlin Brothers released The Little Folks' Painting Book, with outline drawings by the illustrator Kate Greenaway alongside short stories and rhymes. McLoughlin Brothers went on publishing coloring books for decades.
Rise of Adult Coloring Books
The 1960s: coloring books as satire
The first coloring books written for adults weren't about relaxing. The Executive Coloring Book (1961), created by three advertising men in Chicago, poked fun at office life. It was followed by a wave of satirical coloring books in the 1960s that joked about politics and society. They were meant to be read and laughed at more than colored.
The 2010s boom
Coloring books made for adults to actually color took off in the 2010s. Johanna Basford's Secret Garden came out in 2013, and by 2015 detailed adult coloring books, full of flowers, animals, patterns and mandalas, were one of the big publishing stories of the year.
Coloring Today
Today you can color in a printed book, print pages at home from a PDF, or color on a tablet. Printable pages let you print just the pages you want, and print a favorite again if you'd like to try different colors.
Flowers, animals, landscapes and mandalas are still common themes. Newer styles include grayscale coloring pages, where the shading is already printed and you color over it, and bold and easy pages with thick outlines and larger shapes.
Related: Adult Coloring Pages Printable Collection
Sources
- An 18th-Century Botanical Coloring Book for Adults (Hyperallergic)
- The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks' Painting Book (Open Culture)
- The First Adult Coloring Book: The Executive Coloring Book From 1961 (Open Culture)
- Adult Coloring Books Were Popular (and Subversive) in the 1960s (Smithsonian)
- PW Notables of the Year: Johanna Basford (Publishers Weekly)