It’s hard to escape the allure of the Back to School season, with its new shoes, backpacks, and three-ring binders, shiny pencil cases with sharpened pencils inside, and fresh, pink, perfect erasers. Even with another month of summer still technically before us, and even though many of us aren’t even going back to school, September is still a month of yellow busses, crunchy leaves and new beginnings. The good news is that anyone can start studying via Canadian Bookshelf and the amazing array of how-to books that can be found in our virtual library.

So you want to find out How to Be a Spy. Or even more mysteriously, How to Crack the Cryptic Crossword? You can find out How to Be Happy, or at least How to Be Not Too Bad.

Heritage House Publishers has a whole line of fishing manuals, from How to Catch Trout to How to Catch Crabs, and at the end of the day there’s always How to Cook Your Catch. Back on dry land, there is How to Make a Garden, How to Get Your Lawn off Grass, and you can go to natural extremes with How to Get Your Lawn and Garden Off Drugs.

Or think bigger! Honest Ed Mirvish tells you How to Build an Empire. At the other end of the spectrum, find out How to Tax a Billionaire. Or How to Sell a Lobster, which promises to change the way you think about business. For kids, check out the award-winning How to Build Your Own Country.

Fancy taking up a new language? Pick up How to Speak Pirate: A Treasure Chest of Seafaring Slang, or How to Speak Hockey: Hockey/English Translation Dictionary. Even fiction can take a didactic turn: from Robert Priest, find out How to Swallow a Pig, and then Michelle Berry will tell you How to Get There From Here.

For all you multi-taskers out there, you can pick up a copy of Red Green’s How to Do Everything. Rebecca Eckler will tell you How to Raise a Boyfriend, which might involve giving him a copy of Claudia Dey's How to Be a Bush Pilot. Let Will Ferguson show you How to be a Canadian, and it might also be wise to pick up a copy of How Not to Murder Your Mother.

For interesting results,why not pair Karleen Pendleton Jiménez’s memoir How to Get a Girl Pregnant with How to Make Love in a Canoe? There’s also How to Make Love to a Movie Star, and Dany Laferriere’s novel How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired.

Get ahead with How to Be a Mentsh (and not a Schmuck), or How to Argue and Win Every Time. And if it’s not all about you, then let Elizabeth May tell you How to Save the World in Your Spare Time. And if it’s not all about the world after all, then why not discover Why the Leafs Suck and How they Can be Fixed?

Then save your own life with How Not to Move Back in With Your Parents, How Not to Completely Suck as a New Parent, and another book called Are You Ready?, whose subtitle is “How to Prepare for an Earthquake”.

Good to know.