Rad Nauseam · David Cole

My fiancée bought this book for me back when I was in that "esoteric/vintage instructional material book collecting" phase most young men go through in their early twenties. Flipping through it for the first time, it honestly didn't really impress me. On a closer look though, there's some remarkable gems in this sweet little mama.

The use of white space throughout this book is awesome and surprisingly sophisticated for a children's book. The pages are otherwise filled with bright two color illustrations of various "things-to-do". I'm fairly certain this book was meant for the poorer youth as most of these games use household objects and sound incredibly dull.

In the above game you flick coins into cups in a miniature approximation of golf. In the below, kids compete to remember things. Grand Theft Auto, suck a fat one:

The included activities have such provocative titles as "Canteen", "Semaphore", "Soup to Nuts", "Blow It and Bust It" and "Schnozzola". No comment on the below:

A surprisingly modern turn can be found in the "Book Plate" activity.

This kind of playful geometric lettering is über hip right now with poster designers.

The real diamond in this book, though, is the instructional page for a game titled "Ghost". When I saw this, I swear to god my jaw snapped off, dropped, rolled down the stairs and went missing. This is fucking AWESOME:

I can't even begin to describe how god damned cool this page is so I'm just going to let it stand for itself.

There's a girl's version of this book as well, which I hope to get soon. While I'll probably never play any of these games as they sound stupid as all get out, the Treasury will be a proud member of my library for a long time.