I purchased Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities after hearing its author, Kevin Kelly, talk about it in a podcast. Kelly is a really interesting guy (he co-founded Wired and wrote the semi-religious book What Technology Wants), so I thought it would be worth the investment. You can see in the picture just how many tabs I put in. More on that later.
What the book is: One of Kelly’s core ideas in his book What Technology Wants is that we should decide whether technology is useful before using it. For instance, hammers are useful technology, whereas social media’s value is less clear. This book shares the best tools he’s found over the years. That’s a broad category, so this catalog contains tools ranging from Materials Libraries to books on the Eastern canon to kitchen supplies.
What It’s Not: it’s not shaped well. This is the weirdest format of any book I’ve read. It doesn’t fit well on a shelf or a coffee table. It’s basically a small newspaper.
What it is, on closer examination: This book is like reading a Sears catalog – if every item was best-in-class and useful. Reading this is fun.
I’ve been browsing this catalog in my office for three days now, placing tabs all over the place. I just bought a new nose hair trimmer based on one entry. I’ve bookmarked a ton of entries ranging from safety knee boots, to Aladdin lamps, to the best guide for hiring smart.
This book combines two eras: The joy and wonder of flipping through a Sears catalog at Christmas plus the early days of the Internet, when everything was useful and people were wildly optimistic.
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