Shiv Kumar

Shiv Kumar writes books that take something people find fiddly and make it plain enough to get on with.

It started with mental math. The Vedic Maths series — Multiply Any Number in 3 Seconds, Square & Cube Roots in Your Head, Divide Like a Calculator — teaches the old shortcuts for working without a calculator, one trick at a time, with drills to make them stick. The Smartcuts books carry the same method into the exam room: GMAT Quant Smartcuts, GRE Quant Smartcuts and SAT Math Smartcuts each pair a four-week plan with 50 practice problems and full worked solutions, aimed squarely at the sections where the clock does the damage.

The same instinct produced Room to Color. Adult coloring books are usually drawn small and intricate, which rules out anyone who finds fine detail more frustrating than fun. The Room to Color books — Cozy Corners, Simply Nostalgic and Old-Time Country Life — are drawn instead in thick, clean outlines with large open areas, 48 designs to a book, printed single-sided so a marker never ruins the picture on the other side.

Two shelves, one rule: nothing shrunk down to fit.