Let’s color

Curious about the adult-coloring-book-craze, I set aside an hour to color.

(If you haven’t tripped over this trend, you haven’t spent enough time in your local bookstore.)

Tucked into a bowl of rice vermicelli at a Vietnamese restaurant, I slid a postcard coloring book out of my purse, turned off my cell and lost myself in the stylized stalks and fronds of an art nouveau drawing. I had four green pens in slightly different shades that I’d been itching to take for a ride.

Around me, waitresses talked and laughed as they replenished the chopsticks at each table. Next to me, young intellectuals discussed the virtues of an old New Yorker article about a Chicago chef who contracted tongue cancer. But I just kept coloring. Coloring isn’t so much entertaining as it is transporting. Coloring forces you to limit your focus to the page and your hand. Your family, your job, your problems — that stuff floats up and out of your head.

And it’s kind of a nice break from reading, I thought, guiltily.

The staggering success of Johanna Basford’s “Secret Garden” coloring book — elaborate pen and ink sketches with tiny creatures or magical objects hidden on every page — has unleashed a new, nondigital trend. (I like to think Houston was at the forefront. In 2013, rapper Bun B and local teacher Shea Serrano released “Bun B’s Rap Coloring and Activity Book.”)

Frederick Glasser, a sales director at Barron’s publishers, said the lure of the adult coloring book is Jungian: “Many of us colored as children, and I think we want to go back to that place,” Glasser said. “You start coloring, just focus on that, and everything else goes away.”

Ülrika Moats, gift buyer for Houston’s Brazos Bookstore, agrees.

“You forget how much fun you had coloring as a kid,” Moats said. “It’s a very nostalgic thing. And the books are helpful for people who don’t think they’re creative.”

For more than a month, Brazos, at 2421 Bissonnet, has devoted an entire display table to coloring books and select utensils. Should you use watercolors? Colored pencils? Yummy Yummy Scented glitter gel pens?

Here are five cool coloring books for adults.

“Art Nouveau Postcard Colouring Book” (The Pepin Press): Postcard-size pictures are appealing, and who wouldn’t want to receive a hand-colored postcard in the mail? Many of the designs are abstract and wallpape-resque, and the thicker weight of the paper means you can even use watercolor paints without fear of the postcard buckling or the paint bleeding through.

“Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest and Colouring Book,” by Johanna Basford (Laurence King Publishing): Basford, the Scottish illustrator whose first coloring book became a runaway bestseller, draws exquisitely detailed sketches with a magical quality. If “Alice in Wonderland” had a few throw pillows down the rabbit hole, they’d be printed with Basford’s drawings.

“Heming-wasted Coloring Book: A Loving Look at Literary Lushes” (limited edition published by Brazos Bookstore, for Independent Bookstore Day; available for $12 at the store): This is my favorite, in part because of the sloppily colored picture of Papa on the cover. Each drawing comes with an accompanying author quote. Anne Sexton: “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” Ogden Nash: “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”

“Mexican Patterns to Color,” by Lawrie Taylor, Emily Beevers and Struan Reid (Usborne): Masks, skeletons, costumes, the Aztec Sun Stone and more make this coloring book informative and fun. I suspect this book is for kids because the designs are less intricate than in the other books. But I don’t care.

“Splendid Cities: Color Your Way to Calm,” by Rosie Goodwin and Alice Chadwick (Little, Brown and Company): For the colorer who daydreams about exotic locales, this transporting book offers drawings of “dream cities” dense with every conceivable scenario: from cityscapes to seascapes, palm trees to wind turbines, front doors to back gardens.