Anna Johnson

Anna Johnson is a freelance writer and the author of the top-selling Three Black Skirts, Handbags, and The Yummy Mummy Manifesto. She has written for publications including InStyle, Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue, Elle, and The Guardian. She lives with her son in Sydney and New York.

SAVVY CHIC: The Art of More For Less (2010)

From Anna Johnson, the author of Three Black Skirts and Handbags comes an invaluable manual for how to live well and elegantly on a budget. The perfect book for our more frugal times, Savvy Chic celebrates “the Art of More for Less,” illuminating the path to smarter, more creative spending for every woman trying to cut corners and save money, but who still wants to live and look fabulous. Savvy Chic belongs on every woman’s bookshelf, right next to The Modern Girls Guide to Life.

Anna Johnson is not a tea-bag squeezer, a penny-pincher, or inherently thrifty in any way—but she knows how to enjoy the finer things in life . . . for much, much less! In Savvy Chic, she shares her secrets on how to dress, decorate, entertain, and travel in high style without breaking the piggy bank.

Style: Get "rich girl" chic for dimes and master the fine art of thrift-shop vintage.
Decorating: Create exquisite curtains with Chinese lace tablecloths and shop the flea market like a stylist.
Entertaining: Feast on abundant rather than expensive food—from the ten-dollar dinner to the shoestring wedding reception.
Travel: Fake snobby style in Capri or make a one-star hotel feel like home.
Leisure: Take the town with nothing but a ball gown and twenty dollars or enjoy the most original dates in the history of love, for less of course.

All it takes to live well is taste, style, imagination, and rebellious flair—and Savvy Chic will show you how. Fun, fulfilling, and frugally fabulous, here's your indispensable guide to five-star elegance on a one-star budget.

Rights: Avon/HarperCollins, World English; Primus, Slovenia

THE YUMMY MUMMY MANIFESTO (2008)

A Yummy Mummy strides through maternity with style, passion, savvy, a healthy sense of self, and killer cleavage. She soars above the domestic rut, craves creative revelation, and turns motherhood into an adventure–an art rather than a skill.

The Yummy Mummy Manifesto, Anna Johnson’s unique mix of advice, do-it-yourself ideas, riffs, and personal reflections about motherhood, shows how to make the most important job you’ll ever have more delicious in every detail. Blooming with comforting and entertaining guidance on everything from style and decor to nutrition and finding your own parenting approach, this book provides something for every new mother or hot mama-to-be, covering breast-feeding basics, dressing the in-between body, emotional roadblocks, quirky mile stones, and throwing a simple but chic first birthday party. Johnson liberates the pregnant belly from the laws of good taste–yes, you can rock horizontal stripes, big polka dots, and crazy, large floral prints–and shares ways to decorate the nursery without resorting to duckling yellow wallpaper and gingham dust ruffles. Most important, through it all, she reveals how to hold onto your spirit, creativity, wit, and sensuality.

Hilarious, enlightening, practical, candid–and joyously illustrated–The Yummy Mummy Manifesto does maternity with flair, heart, and utter bliss.

Rights: Random House/Ballantine, North America; Contact, Holland; Primus, Slovenia

HANDBAGS: 900 Bags to die for (2002)

The Bolide. The Plume. The Birkin--object of lust in Sex in the City. Celebrating the must-have accessory for the fashion conscious woman, Handbags is an obsessive, irresistible visual extravaganza, featuring over 900 full-color photographs of the most luxurious, witty, covetable, talismanic examples of the bagmaker's art and history.

The iconic Hermés Kelly bag, made from first stitch to last by a single craftsperson. Judith Leiber's whimsical minaudiFres, Moschino's smiley-face bag, Elsa Schiaparelli's surrealist "bird cage," and the ne plus ultra of fashionable purses--the Chanel bag, reinvented for a new generation by Karl Lagerfeld. There are novelty bags, evening bags, sculptural bags, and class acts. Practical leather pochettes to carry a life, and elegant little reticules for nothing more than a credit card and a lipstick. Profiles of famous bagmakers: Jamin Puech, Kate Spade, Carlos Falchi, and the poet of utility, Bonnie Cashin, with her visionary "Cashin Carry" bags for Coach. Plus the anonymous Florentine artisans whose specialist leather workshops sprouted up in the 14th century.

A labor of love written by Anna Johnson, author of Three Black Skirts, Handbags features over 900 bags from collections, museums, and designers around the world, most of them photographed in seductive full-color exclusively for the book. The perfectly matched complement to Shoes, Handbags is about fashion, about desire, about secrecy, craftsmanship, art, and imagination as well as about the changing roles of women--everything that's packed into every important bag. Includes timelines, fascinating captions, and the "It" bags--anyone for a Fendi baguette?

Rights: Workman, World

THREE BLACK SKIRTS (2000)

It's the real thing. It's about getting your life together. It's about looking damn fine. It's about man handling. It's about the casa question. About solitude. About stain removal. Whether you're a young woman just out of school and starting a career or a successful thirty-something, if you're still wasting time looking for stockings that match or struggling to keep on top of credit card bills, you need help. And not a glossy monthly's unattainable idea of help, but the stuff that works--the nuts and bolts.

Anna Johnson's Three Black Skirts is the book that delivers. In a voice that's knowing, smart, hip and funny--and with the author's own retro illustrations to match--Ms. Johnson cuts right to the core of the chaos that passes for life today and shows how to find order, balance, fulfillment. She covers it all: health, dating, career moves, finances, entertaining, body image, sex, and, of course, the indispensability of owning three black skirts. She offers the twenty basics for money management, and three keys for shopaholics to gain control over their passion. A workshop to build better food habits. Ten ways to get to sleep. Dress codes to the major cities. A Schmoozer's Guide to Compliments. Principles of Modern Courtship. And everything in between, from an extensive stain removal chart to eleven ideas for reawakening your spiritual life.

Rights: Workman, U.S.; Penguin, Australia; Piper, Germany; Contact, Holland; Forum, Sweden; Paidos, Spain; Eksmo, Russia; Rocco, Brazil; Editorial Bizanchio, Portugal; Cappelens, Norway; Sony Magazine, Japan; Korea

Calendar rights: Workman, World English