2026-05-23 00:00:00
P.T. Barnum was 70 years old when he turned his most popular lecture into this book in 1880. By then, he’d already built America’s most famous museum in New York, introduced General Tom Thumb to audiences, served as mayor of Bridgeport, gone broke from a disastrous investment in a Connecticut clock company, and clawed his way back. He was 60 when he co-founded the traveling show that eventually became Barnum & Bailey Circus. The Art of Money Getting compresses a lifetime of hustle into 20 plainspoken rules.
Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Most people get this backward. They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. The people who succeed have a knack for what they do. Find your knack first.
Debt eats self-respect. Barnum says young people, especially, should avoid it. The moment you owe somebody money, you’ve handed them a piece of your freedom. The whole game is keeping income above outgo.
Half-doing is expensive. Barnum watched neighbors spend whole lifetimes poor because they only kind of worked, while somebody else got rich doing the same job thoroughly. The people who go all in pull ahead of the ones who don’t.
Nobody buys from someone they don’t trust. You can be the friendliest merchant in town, but if a customer suspects you of cheating, they’ll walk to the next shop. Dishonesty might pay this week. It costs you over a lifetime. Reputation is the actual asset.
“Money is, in some respects, like fire. It is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.”
Book Freak is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run Recomendo, the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, and Book Freak.
2026-05-22 00:00:00
I wrote in an earlier issue about an off-brand mesh belt I wear on airport days that doesn’t have any metal in it. That one has a clasp belt, but a new one I’ve been trying has a nicer-looking buckle that snaps the two ends together and feels solid. The belt itself is stretchy too, so it’s a superior double-duty one you can wear during more demanding activities. It’s well-made, comes in 11 colors, and is guaranteed for life. See more here on Amazon.
Want to know what it’s like to drive around a foreign city, listening to a local radio station? You can do it from home by visiting DriveAndListen.app, which uses dashcam footage. The tunes really transported me to the scene in Delhi and Izmir and when I pulled up Havana, I was riding in a vintage car. If you don’t like the station you can change it, just like in a real car.
I hesitated to highlight this Internations Expat Quality of Life Survey since that site mostly appeals to relocated corporate executives living in walled-off enclaves. Turns out it’s full of interesting and detailed insights though. Panama was the big winner, moving from 16 to 3, joining always-highly-rated Spain and much richer countries like Luxembourg and Austria. Czechia and China moved into the top 10 and I’m assuming someone will replace #2 Dubai in the next one. But the Philippines got trashed despite the sea and sunshine (#45 of 46) and wow does the survey kill that “America is the greatest” boast since the country ranks #43. “The USA ranks dead last when it comes to Healthcare and receives disappointing results in the Safety & Security Subcategory (43rd).”
If you have an AAdvantage account with American Airlines, you should probably change your password. As in today. The company is being quiet about how much data was compromised in several hacker-claimed cyberattacks in the past year, one of them in April. Based on my wife’s frustrating experience though, it was a lot. The company locked her out of her account a month ago, saying it was compromised, and she still doesn’t have access. After a month of hold times, six sessions of being passed around between agents, and unkept promises about a fix, they’re now apologizing that “The fraud department is completely overwhelmed right now.”
A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.
2026-05-21 01:34:00
N-1
Call it Buddhist, Stoic, existentialist, or whatever, this is my shorthand for capturing the idea that we will do everything in our lives a finite number of times and that eventually we will do everything a final time. I tattooed it on my arm. It helps me more deeply appreciate the good moments, recognize that even the challenging things will end, and reminds me that there will eventually be a final time. And, sadly, we often don’t know when that is. Is it now? Sam Harris’s Last Time meditation from his excellent Waking Up app conveys this better than I can.
Sign up here to get What’s in my NOW? a week early in your inbox.
2026-05-20 00:00:00
Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater
by Eric P. Nash
Abrams ComicArts
2009, 304 pages, 8.6 x 9.2 x 1.1 inches
Manga Kamishibai tells and shows the fascinating history of Japanese paper theater, a lost storytelling form and the link between Edo-era Japanese ukiyo-e prints and modern day manga and television. I say “and shows” because this art form combined the spoken word with compelling visuals in uniquely Japanese storytelling performances and this book is rich with many wonderful reproductions of the hand-painted artwork.
Picture this: In devastated post-WWII Tokyo, a man stops his bicycle on a street corner. On the back of his bike is mounted a large, sixty-pound wooden box. The man flips a few panels around to reveal a stage-like picture frame. He noisily clacks together two wooden sticks, hiyogoshi, to call the neighborhood children. As they gather to see and hear the free show, the man sells them home-made penny candies, including a not-too-sweet taffy that’s pulled and stretched using a chopstick (like today’s movie business, the real money is in the profitable concessions!). The paying customers get a front row seat to the performance. The man slides a sequence of large, colorful panels in the frame “screen” as he tells adventure stories, quizzes the audience, and weaves tales of suspense, all with character voices and sound effects. As the story ends on a dramatic, to-be-continued cliff-hanger, the man packs up his two-wheel theater and pedals away … until next time. They are all but vanished now, but these performances date back to the 1930s when 2,500 kamishibaiya in Tokyo alone entertained 1 million kids a day.
Any fan of manga, anime, as well as comics in general will devour this book. The reproductions of the lurid images of action heroes, monsters, villains, and damsels in distress in the stories embody a potent mix of influences: Japanese ink brush work, movie posters, silent film and cinematic design, and plenty of Western references. The army of artists that painted these panels freely borrowed from many genres, from Betty Boop to folk tales. In turn, kamishibai set the stage for the manga and anime that took its place (many of the same artists moved along with them). As the advent of television made these live street performances obsolete (television was first called denki kamishibai, or “electric paper theater”), the artists lifted from popular TV shows for their dying art form. Holy copy-cat, Batman!
You’ll enjoy the witty captions, wide–ranging historical references and the clever writing style. This book also shows and tells how kamishibai was used to disseminate news, spread propaganda, illustrate war survival techniques, and fight prejudices. In a parallel to the congressional hearings and criticism by Wertham of the U.S. comic makers, kamishibai also was investigated and regulated. You’ll read (and see) other interesting facts, like the technological and historical reason why comics have always been an important media form in Japan. (Hint: what if your language doesn’t suit itself to using Gutenberg’s movable type?). Manga Kamishibai is a real treat for any fan of Japanese pop culture (candy not included). – Bob Knetzger
Nod Away
by Joshua Cotter
Fantagraphics
2016, 240 pages, 7.8 x 10.2 x 0.8 inches
Sometimes the most abstruse and esoteric dilemmas are best considered in the abstract, as if by not directly looking at things somehow makes them more clear. Zen masters speak in koans, Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms, and poets immerse themselves in metaphors, all of them trying to communicate things in a manner that steps outside of the constraints of language. So it is with Joshua W. Cotter’s new book from Fantagraphics Books, Nod Away.
Nod Away is the first of what Cotter promises to be a seven-volume series. Ostensibly this first volume is a sci-fi story that circles around issues such as the human desire for exploration and connection, the power structure inherent in gender politics, and the gray area created in the intersection between science and morality, but, as the book unfolds, the reader feels there is something more complicated occurring in the periphery. Cotter is exploring profound questions of consciousness itself by creating a story that asks them indirectly.
Densely detailed and tightly packed, Cotter’s pages pull and push the classic nine-panel grid layout, opening up or staying regimented as the emotional beat demands. His layouts control the reader’s experience explicitly and play with expectations in order to keep things just off balance enough to force engagement and demand active reading. Just when things start to coalesce, though, Cotter blows them apart.
Two stories run simultaneously in Nod Away. The first, tight and traditionally told in the sci-fi/horror genre, posits strong statements and allows for gradual character reveals. It is in the secondary tale, though, one of a damaged man traversing a desolate environment, that Cotter enlarges his art and permeates it with surrealistic and totemic imagery that presses the reader to observe and to pause and to ponder.
Nod Away stands at the verge of a much longer journey, reassuringly beckoning the reader to follow and promising something incredible to be discovered at its end. – Daniel Elkin
Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.
2026-05-19 00:00:00
While traditional paper-book publishing declines, personal paper-book making ascends. Books have gone from industrial commodity to precious hand-made artifact. There’s a renaissance of handcrafted book-making by enthusiasts and Alisa Golden has played a key role in documenting and teaching this makers’ art. I have a number of book-making books, and this one by her is by far the most complete and thorough. Her diagrams and instructions are very clear. This hefty how-to manual gives directions for creating over 100 different types of books, book bindings and book-ish things. It incorporates her previous two how-to manual, adds new material and will guide anyone through the process of making a paper book by hand. Even better, it will prompt you to experiment with your own book-making designs. — KK
Top: Watercolor pencils
Second row: Colored waxed linen, natural linen thread and bookbinding needle, beeswax, binder clip, Japanese screw punch
Third row: Bone folder, archival superfine black pen, pencil, stencil brush, assorted papers, craft knife, awl, scissors
Bottom: Metal ruler; cutting mat under all
During a trip to Germany almost 20 years ago, I came across one of those slap-of-the-head clever items in an office supply store that I use to this day. When I bought this I was so enamored with it that I actually picked up a second one, thinking that eventually it would wear out and that it would be difficult to find a replacement. Turns out that I was happily wrong on both counts; the extra one that I bought is still in its original plastic display box and a slightly different version (photo below) is widely available. The PaperFix that I’ve owned for all these years is silent in use, completely ecological, and the ongoing cost is zero. I reach for it at least a few times a day and with one firm press of the top can bind about 6 to 8 pages (depending on paper thickness) together.
I find magazines too bulky to carry around when there are only a few articles in them that I actually want to read. Through years of traveling and learning to eliminate weight and waste, I now tear out articles I’m interested in and put them all in a folder labeled “Reading” that goes everywhere with me, and use my Paperfix to bind each individual article.
I prefer the PaperFix over paper clips or binder clips for a number of reasons, the first of which is space saving. If you have ever had 15 paper-clipped articles in a folder and seen how they expand the girth of that folder, you’ll know what I mean. Paper clips and binders have to be put somewhere when they’re removed. Clips of all varieties fall off and have a nasty habit of inserting themselves into every conceivable crack in cars, briefcases and desk drawers.
Once a page is removed from the bound bundle (unlike with a paper clip) it can’t be reinserted, nor can you pull out sheets from the midst of the bundle without disrupting the binding of the bundle. While the PaperFix doesn’t do everything a stapler can (particularly with thicker stacks of paper), for the vast majority of quick binding jobs it’s as good as a stapler, and takes up about a third the room on a desktop or in a drawer. It’s less expensive and uses nothing other than a press on the top to get its job done. — Scott Goldman
My theater group always uses these for stapling our programs together. It’s a serious workhorse, big and heavy, and the longer reach will allow you to make booklets out of much, much bigger material than the Mini Booklet Stapler. The stapler has a 12″ reach on it, so you can staple anything up to 24″ wide pre-fold (so architectural ‘D’-sized paper could be used, if you felt like it). And unlike the mini model, it takes standard staples. The staplers we use were old when I got involved with this theater group (about 7 or 8 years ago), and they’re still working like brand new. They are made almost entirely out of steel and are incredibly durable. We mostly use them for programs of no more than 6 sheets of standard paper and a heavy high-gloss cover sheet, but we do several hundred of these programs in a batch every couple of months. We also use them for stapling short scripts, say, 20 pages (long scripts get the three-ring binder). There’s a neat little plastic clip on the stapler (which is nicely graduated) that lets you set the width, which makes lining up the fold on your booklets very convenient; you just push your material to the clip and staple. Great for big batches. — Andy Martin
It remains a paper world. Should you ever need to buy a stapler, this is the one to get. By the Archimedean power of levers, one very light push on its head will effortlessly punch a staple through 20 or more sheets. Secures amazingly easily. All staplers should work like this. — KK
Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.
2026-05-18 00:00:00
I am a huge fan of Dan Pink’s short pithy advice videos, some of which I have recommended before. His latest one is on an unconventional topic: how to spend money wisely. In a lot of ways, this particular advice is more important to grasp than the usual advice on how to make money, yet few talk about how to spend well. Science-based, no fluff, this distilled wisdom is well worth your 8 minutes. — KK
Software engineer Rob Ennals wanted his 11-year-old son to understand how modern AI works, but couldn’t find a tutorial that was rigorous without being either hand-wavey or impenetrable. The result is Learn AI Layer by Layer, a free online book with interactive playgrounds in every chapter. It assumes middle-school math. If you want a clear, hands-on explanation of what happens inside an LLM, this is the best one I’ve come across. — MF
This one is for the people with breasts. I’ve been stuck in Victoria’s Secret sizing since adolescence because I could never figure out how to translate my measurements to any other brand. Over the years I tried in-person fittings and indie bra makers, but I’d ultimately go back to the devil I knew. This illustrated NPR guide by a professional bra fitter is what finally got me unstuck. It walks you through how to measure yourself at home and explains the different styles of bras. Once I had my true size, I tried Negative Underwear (worth the influencer hype, in my opinion) and now it’s the only brand I wear. I hope I can finally retire from the search for the perfect bra. — CD
This livestream of a Dutch canal lock has a virtual doorbell viewers can ring to snap a picture and let the operator know fish are waiting to be let through. It doesn’t really open on demand, but the idea is very charming. If you scroll down you can see all the fish that have been recently spotted. I found it in the Deepculture newsletter, just back from my first trip to Amsterdam where I rented a boat and navigated the canals. It felt synchronistic, like a souvenir from my trip. — CD
A friend gifted me a fancy five-color ink-jet printer they were not using. It would be great except for a common malady: the manufacturer no longer supported a driver for it for my computer. This calamity is so common there is a community solution: Gutenprint (formerly Gimp-print). Public minded angels post open-source drivers for all kinds of computer-printer combinations, available for free downloads. Their Mac support is spotty, but older versions can still work. My needed driver was there. One caveat; it only supplies the printing functions, but lacks the maintenance and cleaning cycles. Still, I now have a printer that prints. — KK
My daughter had a few rolled-up posters that kept springing off the wall — regular poster tack wasn’t strong enough to hold the curl flat, and we didn’t want to poke pinholes through the posters themselves. These Outus magnetic push pins solved it. You push a pin into the wall, lay the poster over it, then snap the included magnet onto the pin from the front to clamp the poster in place. The magnets are strong, and the only damage is a tiny hole in the wall — not in the poster. — MF
Your personal data is being sold right now. Addresses, phone numbers, even old records you forgot existed. Incogni hunts it all down and wipes it from data broker sites automatically. Take back your privacy today and get 55% off with code RECOMENDO
Sign up here to get Recomendo a week early in your inbox.
