John Murray acquires Munroe's 'delightfully mind-bending' self-help guide

John Murray has acquired the new "delightfully mind-bending'" book from bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe.

Georgina Laycock acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for How To from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Seth Fishman at The Gernert Company. The John Murray Press imprint will publish the book on 3rd September 2019.

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, features Munroe's famous stick figure illustrations and scientific thoughts in "the world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide". It is billed as providing "highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole".

Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analysing the pixels of your Facebook photos, how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a millennial by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth and offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the moon.

A former NASA roboticist, Munroe is the creator of "xkcd", a stick-figure webcomic read by millions of fans each week about science, technology, and the absurdities of the modern world. His number one bestselling book What If? and the follow-up Thing Explainer have sold several million copies worldwide and What If? spent 22 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. In total he has sold 295,761 books in the UK for £2.47m, with the paperback of What If? his biggest seller at 129,811 copies sold.