Mess: The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes

In Mess: The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes, Keri Smith, creator of Wreck This Journal, asks readers to explore what it feels like to throw themselves off balance - on purpose.

Your whole life you've been taught to avoid making a mess: try to keep everything under control, colour inside the lines, make it perfect, and at all costs, avoid contact with things that stain.

Keri Smith's Mess asks you to do the opposite of what you have been taught. Think of it as your own personal rumpus room. A place to lest loose, to trash, to spew, to do the things you are not allowed to do in the real world.

Smith dares readers to drop some kind of coloured liquid (ink, tea, coffee) onto a page from a good height (at least five feet); draw in the dark (or with eyes closed); creatively misspell words; paint a picture in a water-based medium (pen, marker, watercolour, etc) and leave it out during a rain or snowstorm; and bury this book, then dig it up.

Bestselling author Keri Smith is a freelance illustrator by trade, and has illustrated for the Washington Post, The New York Times, Ford Motor Company, People, The Body Shop and Hallmark. She is the author of Wreck This Journal, How to be an Explorer of the World and Mess: The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes. She lives in Canada.