To-Do List: Keeping Track of Our Common Compulsions

Special offer for limited-edition/collector’s edition copies: order by September 19, 2018!

To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soulmate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us was an outgrowth of To-Do List magazine.

Published from 2000 to 2003 from San Francisco, To-Do List was a magazine of meaningful minutiae that published essays, interviews and art using the idea of a to-do list as a jumping-off point to explore the details of modern life.

As we prepared the first issue I placed an ad in Bitch magazine asking people to send me their to-do lists in the mail. Much to my surprise, thousands of people took me up on the offer. I discovered the delightful experience of visiting a PO Box in San Francisco, opening the postal box and finding handwritten to-do lists from strangers.

Those lists served as the art for To-Do List magazine to provide visual relief to our essays and interviews. Much like The New Yorker uses cartoons as its signature artwork, To-Do List used handwritten lists. The lists are stories in and of themselves, a snapshot of humanity, wants, dreams, neuroses, obsessions, capacities and incapacities.

To-Do List won Best New Magazine in Utne‘s Alternative Press Awards in 2000.

Listen to me talk about To-Do List the book and magazine on NPR’s Talk of the Nation here.

Get a Collector’s Edition Copy of To-Do List (or the Whole Set!)

We have very limited number of copies of To-Do List magazine to offer. These are special objects so you want to reserve fast to get your To-Do Lists!

• There are very few of these print magazines on the planet and you won’t find these on offer anywhere else. If you’re a collector these are special magazines to collect.
• I’ll sign the magazine for you and write you a special note! They would make amazing gifts for someone else or yourself. I’ll write a note, just tell me who it’s for in “order notes.”
• To-Do List is where quirkyalone got started in that first issue, the Love-Anti Love issues. So you will be holding quirkyalone history in your hands.

These personally signed limited-edition copies will be sent out in September 2018. If you want to take advantage of this special offer order by September 15, 2018.

Simply check off the issues you want for your cart and tell us your mailing address in the order notes. Offer only good for U.S. mailing addresses–sorry international readers!