In this episode, Noah Charney swaps notes with Jonah Howell, lead writer of The Last Book, in a conversation between two Hungry Minds writers. They explore how you explain humanity to an alien audience, why Hungry Minds books are built more like films than manuscripts, and what happens when every entry must squeeze a world of history into a single spread.
This time, it’s an inside job: Noah Charney, author of The Black Book, talks with Jonah Howell, the writer behind The Last Book (who is also hard at work on the forthcoming Atlas of Archetypes). Noah opens with a look at the peculiar creative machine that is Hungry Minds: an international team where text and illustrations grow together, a joke can force a rewrite 100 pages back, and roughly three times more material gets made than ever reaches the page. It’s an inefficient way to make a book, and that’s exactly why the books feel the way they do. Plus, why the Kickstarter-first model lets the team ask readers, “Do you want this strange, beautiful, oversized thing to exist?”
Then Jonah takes us inside The Last Book: how it grew from a single name, Noah Kaplan (yes, our host shares it), and one strange brief: an encyclopedia of humanity written for aliens by Earth’s last survivor. They talk about meetings where six people debate every word against every illustration (“Sudoku with infinite digits”), why the narrator can only remember what one stranded caricature artist could, and the surprising personal story behind the hero’s amnesia. They trace the book’s literary DNA through Beckett, Krasznahorkai, and a Soviet sci-fi story about a lonely alien. Finally, they compare the two books: where The Black Book rebuilds the futures history voted against, The Last Book asks what to do with all of history once it’s over.
Chapters:
00:00 Welcome to the Hungry Minds Podcast
00:46 Meet Jonah Howell, lead writer of The Last Book
02:04 Why Hungry Minds books are made like films
03:43 The Kickstarter-first model
05:31 From New Orleans to Manhattan
05:57 Rilke, a PhD, and the Rilke Trail at Duino
07:32 Behind the scenes: “Sudoku with infinite digits”
09:33 Sketches, drafts, and the value of human-made art
11:26 The premise of The Last Book: a diary for aliens
13:36 What makes the cut when you’re the last human
15:18 The real story behind the hero’s amnesia
16:09 Jonah’s path as a writer and translator
16:46 What makes us human? Throwing darts at a curtain
19:11 Influences: Harold Bloom, Beckett, Krasznahorkai, Tertz
21:52 Feeling like an alien on your own planet
23:05 The Last Book vs. The Black Book: the art of compression
25:48 Dead-end futures vs. the end of history
27:33 Wrap-up
Links:
Noah Charney
Jonah Howell
Hungry Minds
The Last Book
The Black Book
The Book
Noah Charney [00:00:00]
[intro music] Welcome to the “Hungry Minds” podcast. My name is Noah Charney. I’m the author of Hungry Minds’ highly anticipated third book, “The Black Book: The Ultimate Guide to Alternative Inventions.”
I’m thrilled to invite you on a journey through history, tech, and time, exploring the world of Hungry Minds with the team who created it, experts who inspired it, and public figures who love it. Subscribe to the “Hungry Minds” podcast today to be the first to learn about new books, products, and events. For today’s episode, let’s get started. Today’s episode is a little different because I’m sitting down with one of the very few people who knows exactly what it’s like to write a Hungry Minds book from the inside.
Jonah Howell is the lead writer of “The Last Book,” and he’s also working on the forthcoming “Atlas of Archetypes.” Now, I wrote “The Black Book,” so between the two of us, we’ve spent an alarming number of hours inside the peculiar creative machine that is Hungry Minds. And creative machine is really the right phrase, although it’s a very human machine. These books are made remotely by an international team of writers, researchers, editors, designers, and illustrators, all working across time zones, languages, and disciplines.
There are meetings where six or more people can spend a lot of time discussing a very small amount of text, a visual joke, a paragraph, the placement of an illustration, or whether something on page 47 should connect to something 100 pages later. Jonah describes the process in our conversation as being like solving a Sudoku puzzle with infinitely many digits while six people are all working from different game boards. This is accurate. It’s not the unusual publishing model that’s so distinctive, although it is very unusual.
It’s the manner of creating a book that doesn’t really make sense from a business perspective, but very much makes sense from a human one for people who love beautiful, hand-illustrated folio books. This isn’t the normal approach, the writer disappears into a room, emerges with a manuscript, and hands it over. Not at all. Hungry Minds books are built more like films.
The text and images develop together. A piece of research might inspire an illustration. An illustration might inspire a joke. A joke might require the text to be rewritten.
And then 100 pages later, someone realizes that an earlier spread needs to be rethought entirely. There’s a lot of material that’s discarded as well, good material. Jonah estimates that perhaps three times as much writing and illustration gets produced as ever makes it into a final book. And that, to me, is one of the fascinating things about Hungry Minds.
As I said, from a conventional business perspective, much of this makes very little sense. These are huge books. They’re expensive to print. They involve an army of real human illustrators, and in an era where you could press a button and generate something in seconds, although that’s not how we roll.
They require long development cycles, endless revisions, and an obsessive degree of attention to things that many companies would simply decide were, “Ugh, good enough.” It is frankly an inefficient way to make a book, which is exactly why the books feel the way they do. They have fingerprints on them, metaphorically speaking. You can sense the accumulated work, the drafts, the failed ideas, the refinement.
They feel made, crafted, rather than merely produced. And somehow, against the logic of normal publishing economies, they sell really well. And a big reason is the Kickstarter-first model. Instead of spending years making an expensive object and then hoping enough people might want it, Hungry Minds effectively asks the audience first, “Do you want this strange, beautiful, oversized thing to exist?”
And if the answer is yes, the pre-sale provides the momentum and validation to make something much more ambitious than a traditional publisher might dare to greenlight. That model has allowed Hungry Minds to make books that are, in the best sense, excessive. Too big, too detailed, too illustrated, too labor-intensive. Exactly the sort of thing that conventional publishing would probably try to trim down.
Jonah and I have both lived through that process from the writing side. We’ve both had to take the complicated ideas and compress them into tight spreads where the illustrations need room to breathe. We’ve both watched research come in from multiple people, seen sketches evolve through version after version, and learned that writing shorter is often much harder than writing longer. And we both have the experience of looking at the finished book and knowing how much invisible work sits behind every page.
So this episode is partly a conversation between two writers, but it’s also a conversation about how these books are actually made, how you build something collaboratively, remotely, internationally, and very deliberately human. We talk about “The Last Book,” “The Black Book,” Jonah’s influences, the strange discipline of compression, and what happens when a whole team becomes obsessed with making a physical object better than it strictly needs to be, which, now that I think about it, may be the most Hungry Minds thing of all.
Here’s my conversation with Jonah Howell. Jonah Howell, thank you so much for joining us on the “Hungry Minds” podcast. First of all, where am I catching you?
Jonah Howell [00:05:35]
I’m in Manhattan right now.
Noah Charney [00:05:37]
Okay. So, did you grow up there, or did you move there for all the artistic and cultural excitement that Manhattan has to offer?
Jonah Howell [00:05:45]
No, I grew up a long way from here. Now, I’m from, like, maybe 45 minutes northwest of New Orleans,
Jonah Howell [00:05:53]
but moved here about five years ago to do a PhD at CUNY.
Noah Charney [00:05:57]
Aha. What’s your PhD on?
Jonah Howell [00:05:58]
So, it’s, like, in broad terms, it’s in comparative literature, but it’s going to be a bunch of, like, annotated translations from Rainer Maria Rilke. ... who, as I have found out, was not just a poet and that guy who wrote “Letters to a Young Poet,” but also he wrote something like 17 or 18 plays that are tough to get ahold of over here.
Noah Charney [00:06:19]
Well, we got to get you to come visit because I live about an hour from Devin, which is just across the border into Italy from Slovenia, and there’s a castle there that he used to visit, and there is a walk along a cliff above the sea called the Rilke Walk. And he used to hang out, and he would come on holidays there, stay at this castle, and walk along the coast thinking great thoughts, and now you can walk in his footsteps. So, that might be something that would be worth the trip to flesh out your PhD dissertation.
Jonah Howell [00:06:49]
No, it sounds absolutely fabulous. Well, I think, all the more precious now even, because I think the other castle in Northern Italy that he used to stay at was bombed off the map during World War II, so there’s only one left.
Noah Charney [00:07:01]
This one is really intact. It’s a beautiful thing, and I went for the first time just earlier this year and was really impressed because I didn’t know about it. It doesn’t get a lot of hype. It’s sort of tucked away in a corner of Italy that is under-touristed, so it feels a bit like a hidden gem for people, a nice surprise. So, maybe we’ll get you out here one of these days. We can have a Hungry Minds lunch out on the town.
Jonah Howell [00:07:22]
No, it sounds absolutely fabulous. Gwyn did something kind of like that over in Stuttgart about a year ago with Lev and Anna and the crew.
Noah Charney [00:07:32]
Oh, man, it’s really cool. Well, I’d love to hear about your experience, because we’ve both worked behind the scenes with the Hungry Minds team, experiencing the real passion and hands-on, very analog process of illustrations. Tell me what it was like for you, and maybe walk us through the process, because we’re probably the only two people on the planet who know just how much love gets poured into it behind the scenes.
Jonah Howell [00:07:57]
Yeah. Well, us and the rotating cast of half dozen or a dozen people that are in any of these once, twice, or three times a week meetings about the stuff. But yeah, so I kind of met Timur and Seva maybe, oh, lordy, like in late 2021, early 2022, and they had just put the book out, and they were thinking, “Oh, maybe we’ll do another book, but this time maybe we’ll have just one person write it instead of having to coordinate however many hundreds of thousands of writers around the world.”
And actually, I’d been at the gym with Timur’s sister, Roxana, and she mentioned to me, like, “Oh, my brother’s looking for somebody to write this weird book.” And so she introduced us. And so, as we started out, I had just about no idea what was going on, because it’s, as you know better than I do, profoundly different from working with just about any other publisher. Usually, the writer writes the thing, you send it to either an agent or an editor.
Once it’s done, they say, “Eh, this is all right,” or they say, “Hmm, maybe do another draft.” Whereas with this stuff, it was like six people meeting up twice a week, looking over every word meticulously and then comparing to the illustrations, saying, “Oh, it’d look kind of cool if something like this was there. Maybe we’ll write it too. If the writing changes just slightly this way, we can make a joke out of this part of the illustration,” or that, “This connects like a puzzle to 300 pages later,” or something like that.
It was like solving a Sudoku puzzle with infinitely many digits with six people, all with different game boards.
Noah Charney [00:09:33]
[laughs] That’s a great analogy, yeah. And then if you’re in their Telegram or Slack channel, then you see all of the variants and the sketches that go on behind the scenes. And I was telling them, like, a book of just the sketches, not the finished products even, to see how much work, how many drafts go in.
I was joking with Seva and Timur, it’s not a good business plan if you pitch it at a business meeting to investors. [laughs] But it’s the kind of thing that is particularly appreciated by, I think, a lot of people, especially in this very digital age, where these days you could press a button and an AI software could produce illustrations for you, but the soul and sweat of the human illustrators and the very human team and the many drafts it goes through, I think that’s part of the beauty of it, the analogness.
Jonah Howell [00:10:23]
Yeah, absolutely. And I think in other art forms, I think that’s a little bit more of a normal thing, or a thing that’s done at least. I’ve gone to around here, no, a couple of years ago, a buddy of mine named Alex put on an exhibition of the different stages of concept art that H.R. Giger had gone through to make the visuals for “Alien.”
And so for movies and stuff, you’ll have the museum of unused props or the gallery show of the form of the alien that they thought about using, and somebody made a tiny sculpture of it, but they didn’t use it. But I think for these books particularly, that would be a fantastic idea, just because there’s so many of them. And just so much, not just kind of cleaning stuff up as it goes along, but sometimes, 200 pages down the line, you realize something zigged when it should have zagged eight chapters ago, and so stuff is completely redone later on.
There’s probably three times the amount of material, both illustrated and written, that’s produced in the process than actually ends up getting stamped on a page by an offset printer or whatever.
Noah Charney [00:11:26]
Exactly. Well, let’s take it back a step. So the last book, the premise briefly, it’s a wonderfully strange one. So the Earth is gone, there’s one human who survives, and he has to get his stuff together [laughs] and then explain humanity to whoever might actually theoretically find his diary at some point. So where did that idea come from?
Jonah Howell [00:11:46]
When we first talked about it, they had this idea that a guy named Noah Kaplan, for whatever reason, the name of the guy was the first thing, and so he’s referred to throughout the book as Lev’s nephew. But they told me, “We got this idea that a guy named Noah Kaplan is going to write an encyclopedia of humanity for aliens.” But that was- ... all we had at first. And so the question was, all right, why is this guy doing this?
What’s the motive? So we thought, well, generally you would think his readers would probably be human, because why would he assume that aliens would be able to read his particular version of 21st century English, unless there were no other humans left, and he had to assume that aliens had this linguistic competency, or even, I don’t know, visual organs to see his illustrations with. He had to assume it out of desperation. And so we cooked up the, he’s beamed up during an apocalyptic event while he’s sitting in a park drawing caricatures of people, so he has all his materials on him.
And then eventually kind of cycled through a bunch of different ways that he would describe things and tones for the encyclopedia, and landed on drawing a lot from this Soviet short story from, it’s tough to say exactly when it’s from. I think it was written in 1959, but not able to be published until 1966, but in English and in Germany, because Soviet Union. But this short story called “Pkhentz” by Abram Tertz, which was just retranslated while we were working on the last book by Ainsley Morse in North Carolina.
And so we drew a bunch of the tone from, because that story’s about an alien who’s crash-landed on Earth and can’t talk to any of his species, trying to explain what it’s like looking at humanity to him.
Noah Charney [00:13:36]
So the narrator is deciding what deserves to survive and be passed down in this sort of capsule diary. How did you decide what should make the cut, and was there anything that was like, “Yeah, I’m going to leave this out, but this is a tough call”?
Jonah Howell [00:13:52]
That one was real, real, real crowdsourced, by which I mean, we had me pitching ideas, Timur pitching ideas, Seva pitching ideas, Vadim, who I think also did some of the researching for the “Black Book,” tossing ideas out there. Natasha and Margarita, who were researching in all sorts of languages, throwing their ideas, and it was Lev pitching stuff, especially in the art chapter. The guy’s much more an expert on that than I could ever hope to be.
And so it was each of us putting in a whole lot of our own, but also assuming that Noah, in that sort of situation, wouldn’t just be deciding what deserves to be there, but would be drawing on a really, really limited scope of memory, where if it starts to become too all-encompassing or too encyclopedic, then it stops being believable that one random caricature artist on a spaceship without access to a reference library thought it up.
So we couldn’t go full Diderot back in the day, trying to gather everything in the world into French on it, just because that would, the illusion that, it’d be like a fourth wall breakage if he has too much knowledge.
Noah Charney [00:15:01]
And that’s part of the fun, I think, is that it’s very subjective. It doesn’t make sense to be an actual encyclopedia, but it’s all filtered through the one character’s opinion. Does the character have any overlap with you as the author, or was it crowdsourced enough that it really is a fictional third-party character?
Jonah Howell [00:15:18]
Weirdly enough, the character’s only real overlap with me came through not something that I suggested, but an idea that Seva had pretty well at the very beginning. He said, “Oh, it’d be really interesting if this guy had sort of a strange and alien perspective to the world around him already because of having a serious head injury and major amnesia early in life.”
Which, like I said, didn’t come from me, but that was the reason I started kind of studying linguistics and literature to begin with, was massive head injury, forgot how to speak English when I was a teenager, and then had to kind of pick it back up by staring around and rote memorization of stuff over the next while. And so that perspective, it was like, “Okay, I can do this.” The rest of the character, though, is just kind of cobbled together from what the story needed as we went.
Noah Charney [00:16:09]
And had you written many things before this, or is this one of your earlier published works?
Jonah Howell [00:16:15]
Oh, lordy. Before this, I had done a whole lot of short stories for various magazines around here, a good number of translations, mostly of 20th century Russian absurdist stories, whole bunch of Daniil Kharms, that kind of stuff, and a book of poetry co-written with Sofia Sokolova, who is now writing the Oracle book with Hungry Minds. Yeah. But this certainly was, in scope, a much larger project than any that I had worked on before.
Noah Charney [00:16:46]
Yeah, quite a departure. So, there are three books now that are out at the moment through Hungry Minds. It started with “The Book,” which is about what humans made and discovered. The book that I did after yours is about inventions, but the ones that never made it to the mainstream.
The last book has these chapters on things like culture, art, religion, philosophy, jokes, beliefs, not practical things, but maybe the things that make us more human. And I’m wondering, did it raise the question for you what actually makes us human? I remember there was this pod of artifacts from humanity sent into outer space in case an alien scoops it up, and it has Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in it. [chuckles]
And I think you’re kind of doing sort of a version of that. Can you respond to any of that mush that I just posted your way?
Jonah Howell [00:17:37]
Yeah, the idea was, yeah, this guy named Noah is scooped up on this sort of space ark, and couldn’t take any animals with him, and so all he’s got with him is his humanity, whatever that might be, which is completely singular at the point that he’s picked up, because there’s nothing else, no one else picked up with him aside from, later in the book, he finds some earthly companions, but they are of other species. But, occasionally he’ll dip into this more theorizing what human means, or what type of thing these aliens have picked up.
But I think for the most part, he’s not trying to do a definition of humanity in a dictionary sense, but more like, if you’ve got a blindfold on and there’s a black curtain in front of you and some sort of shape of a cardboard cutout behind it, and if you just throw enough darts at that black curtain, eventually you’ll see the shape of the cardboard cutout that you can’t see because they’ll stick in it. It’s more that kind of definition of what a human is.
Just like, all right, here are some things that I remember being significant, just kind of intuitively, remember being intuitively important, significant, salient to us. So that then by the end of the book, hopefully these absentee aliens, whoever they may be, have some sort of idea of what they’ve found. But there’s not a whole lot of... There’s this book sitting over here, over my left shoulder, by Harold Bloom, says, “Our whole notion of what’s human is created by Hamlet and King Lear.” It’s nothing like that.
Noah Charney [00:19:11]
I actually, I grew up in New Haven, and I knew him, Harold Bloom, and he was quite a character. I remember I went to his house once, and he was really sweet, and he signed my copy of “The Western Canon,” and it was a cool experience because he was one of the big dogs back in the day. So, that’s good that you mentioned him. Do you have any points of influence?
I think you mentioned Abram Tertz, and Samuel Beckett, I read in one interview you mentioned, was an influence. There’s also Krasznahorkai. I’m sure I’m mispronouncing it, but that’s an author I hadn’t heard of. And Tertz, honestly, I hadn’t either. What are some of the influences that led you to “The Last Book,” either inspirationally or in terms of writing style?
Jonah Howell [00:19:52]
In terms of both the perspective and the style, the intent was to have each come from the other, not to have a style already set out, but just whatever way that he needed to look at things at X, Y, or Z moment, that the style would follow that. And so, just tried to read as many authors as I could who were really good at describing super alienating, prolonged solitude. And Beckett’s kind of the patron saint of that type of writing, unless we’re going to go back to Meister Eckhart and the Desert Fathers. But Beckett was a huge influence.
A lot of the other characters and things in the book are named after characters from Beckett’s plays. The cow named Ham, all that. And then Krasznahorkai, he, I think up until just maybe a couple of years ago, he was not super known over here. Now he is because he won this past year’s Nobel Prize.
But before that, he had started writing in the ‘80s, but none of his books were published in English until, I think, 2014, 2015. And so, it took a while for us to come around on him. But the guy’s got an incredible way of making his character... Often his books are either each chapter is narrated through one particular person’s eyes, or the whole book is straight from the eyeballs of one character.
And he’s got an absolutely brilliant skill for making each of those characters through whose eyes we’re seeing seem like total just crash-landed yesterday space aliens. So that even when they’re interacting with their fellow normal Hungarians who they’ve known since they were infants, they still feel like they’re undercover agents counterfeiting themselves as human, which is exactly what Noah needed to seem more and more like as the book went on. There’s less and less human interaction to reinforce some notion of a shared humanity or commonality to him.
And so, as the book goes on, he needs to be seeing the Earth in hindsight through weirder and weirder funhouse glasses.
Noah Charney [00:21:52]
It’s funny because I feel like... I grew up in Connecticut, but when I go back to the US, because I go back so infrequently, I feel like I’m an alien. It’s silly to say, but the prices of sandwiches [chuckles] are much higher. But then when I was in New York on a book tour in 2015, I was going to all these cafes, and all of them had what looked like beer on tap, and it was kombucha, and I’d never heard of kombucha.
And it was like, I felt like Mork from “Mork & Mindy,” like, “What the heck is going on?” So, sometimes this can happen even on our own planet.
Jonah Howell [00:22:21]
Oh, absolutely. No, I felt the same way when I moved back to the US, came to New York, but I had been living in North Germany for the last couple of years before that, and came back and was like Aladdin singing in my ears silently, “A whole new world.”
Noah Charney [00:22:36]
[chuckles] Did you also, did you study Russian?
Jonah Howell [00:22:40]
A little bit. I took one class in Russian when I was in Germany, but I was really maybe overestimating my own linguistic competence because it was a Russian 101 class taught in German. And I came out of it having some basic idea of what the cases for nouns were, but very, very little else. But occasionally have translated some stuff just using dictionaries and things.
Noah Charney [00:23:05]
Yeah, of course. Sure. So, I wanted to ask you about the differences you see in our two books by the same company, many of the same illustrators. Yours is “The Last Book,” mine’s “The Black Book.”
What are some of the differences and consistencies you see, imagining that our podcast audience maybe doesn’t have either in front of them?
Jonah Howell [00:23:24]
Totally. On their face, actually, they seem like they have a really, really similar sort of structural skeleton. There’s the individual entries that are each a two-page spread long about a particular artifact, object, concept. And then in between the categories of them, there’s a bit of a longer introduction to the next category.
But I think in terms of commonalities, the thing that probably would be least at the forefront of somebody’s mind if they were not working on one of these books is there’s almost the emergence of something like a house style just from the fact that narrowing down your description of something that’s either particularly complex or that has a particularly variegated history, narrowing down your description of it to fit a roughly 350-word, two-page spread requires some really seriously extreme, almost telegraph operator-like comfortability with brevity. And I see some of the same...
I’m reading through this, I’m like- Ah, yes, that was a longer paragraph once.
Noah Charney [00:24:29]
[laughs] I’m afraid it shows. Yeah, it’s much harder to write shorter and with these confines than it would be if you can just do whatever you want.
Jonah Howell [00:24:37]
Oh, totally. But it also, like I said, it produces some kind of similar styles or turns of phrase or techniques of compression that I think actually, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that it shows that that compression work has been done. It’s more like, you can listen to minimalist or serialist music from way back in the day and hear like, “Oh, this guy studied his Baroque music or whatever,” but just doing this sort of new thing, this experiment here in compressing the same ideas way, way, way down. Similar type of little thing.
And part of that maybe also, there’s a tradition to it. Beckett with his Fizzles back in the day where he was writing these little, little tiny snippets to fit on a page next to Jasper Johns’ illustrations. Right at the end of his career, he didn’t want to write another book. He’s like, “All right, how do I compress a story into the tiniest confines I can?”
There’s a tradition that it kind of has to fit itself into. But in terms of differences, I don’t know, as I was reading through, I thought this, maybe three paragraphs down in your introduction to the information tech and telecom chapter, I was like, “Oh, the guy just perfectly crystallized exactly the central core of this book.” And it’s, “We like to tell the story of computing and telecommunications as a clean march from primitive to modern, but this chapter prefers the messier truth.
The future arrived in fragments, often as expensive dead ends, glorious prototypes, or machines that worked beautifully as long as you treated them like fragile gods. Much of what seems ‘obvious’ now was not obvious at all at first.” And that seems like perfect thing here.
It’s like everybody that invented one of the things that was noteworthy enough for you to mention in “The Black Book,” but didn’t get any further than just being that noteworthy historically, they all, in order to have done the things that they did, had to have this, like maybe a little bit of a noble megalomania that they were doing something really, really pivotal, and it seemed totally self-evident and obvious.
And so it looks like to me, and you definitely know more of what’s going on in the mental backrooms on it than I can tell by reading it, but it looks like what you’re doing is looking at these sort of discontinued snippets of history and reconstructing what possibilities were put on offer, and then for whatever reason, voted against by the arm of providence.
Whereas “The Last Book” starts from like a darker type of existentialism, where from the very beginning, Noah knows he’s the last person, and that all of the hopes, the wishful ideological optimisms that people might have had all over the world, all have, by their results, i.e. total destruction, proved to be empty promises. And so what do you do with the entirety of history once it’s all proved to be one of these self-abortive ventures?
Noah Charney [00:27:33]
That’s a great answer, and I think that’s a good place for us to stop, Jonah. Thank you so much for spending time with us, for writing “The Last Book,” and of course, to all of our listeners, if you have the book, you want “The Last Book” and “The Black Book” too, it’s all part of the same beautiful explosion of creativity, very analog, all human-driven. Thanks, Jonah, as a fellow writer for Hungry Minds, for joining me, for producing such a wonderful text, and to all the illustrators who we’ll have in future episodes to interview as well. They’re beautiful objects.
They’re a perfect gift for somebody who you’re not sure what to get for them because they already have the 27 things they think they want. This is the thing they didn’t realize they want. Jonah, have a good one. Thanks so much, man.
Jonah Howell [00:28:13]
Yeah, same to you, Noah. Thank you.
Noah Charney [00:28:16]
Thanks for listening to the “Hungry Minds” podcast. Be sure to subscribe to learn more about Hungry Minds and all of our exciting projects. See you next time. [music]