Following in the wake of Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of the late Steve Jobs, John Wiley and Sons has teamed with Forbes Media to publish The Zen of Steve Jobs by Caleb Melby and the design studio JESS3, an unusual work of graphic nonfiction focused on the role of Zen Buddhism on Jobs' life and its impact on Apple technology and design. The 80 page color comics narrative will be published in January in both print ($19.95) and e-book formats.
Laura Walsh, senior editor, Wiley Global Finance, the acquiring editor of the book, said the graphic work is focused on a period in the mid-1980s when the late Steve Jobs was forced out of the top job at Apple and he left to develop computers for a new company he founded called NeXT. The book is an imaginative recreation of Job’s spiritual relationship with Kobun Chino Otogawa, a Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist Priest, whose maverick approach to his own spiritual tradition was as iconoclastic as Jobs’ revolutionary impact on technology and culture. Indeed at one point Jobs appointed Kobun as the spiritual guru of NeXT.
She said that the book was produced by Forbes Media, which has released a few excerpts from the book online, and that Wiley and Forbes have a longstanding publishing relationship. She said the business publication approached Wiley to publish the book. Indeed Wiley is crashing the publication of the book and Walsh said they have not yet determined the initial printing. The pub date is January but the book will be in stores by mid December; e-book pricing is still to come but it will be available on all digital platforms.
“The book is a beautiful interpretation of one facet of Jobs life that hasn’t been explored like other parts of his life,” Walsh said, “he had a very influential friendship with Kobun, the Zen Buddhist priest, that impacted his life and his career. Kobun and Zen Buddhism directly influenced the design of Apple products.” While the book is a work of imagination, Walsh emphasized that it is also “heavily researched. The writer Caleb Melby did a ton of interviews with people who knew both men.”
Written by Melby, a former Forbes writer, and illustrated by a team of designer/illustrators from JESS3, a Washington DC Design, illustrations and data visualization firm, the book was originally conceived as a graphic work by Forbes magazine managing editor Bruce Upbin. In a conversaton with Melby that is included in the book, he notes that he was out to do a collaborative story that looked at the development of Jobs design aesthetic.
“Bruce met with Melby and JESS3 about the project and they always planned to do something graphic,” Walsh said. “So much of what Jobs did was graphic, from his devotion to meditation to calligraphy to the ways that Jobs conceived many of Apple’s devices, and the story is told through Melby’s stripped down dialogue and JESS3’s representation of Buddhist practice.”
