Mini Weapons of Mass Destructions provides detailed instructions on how to build more than 30 weapons, mostly from stuff you’d find in the average pack rat’s desk drawer. There are separate chapters on launchers, slingshots, darts, catapults, combustion shooters and claymore mines.

“It’s no literary breakthrough, but it was a fun book to do,” Austin said.

Austin is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stout, with a degree in industrial design.

“It’s a mixture of art and engineering, and my background is product design,” he said. “When I graduated from UW-Stout, I flew out east to Hasbro toys. I had a job in the boys’ action toys division – GI Joe, Transformers, Iron Man, Spiderman, with lots of spring-loaded projectile shooters and guns. My office was filled with toys. Stacked. During winter out east, I would give the neighbor kids GI Joes to shovel the snow. I would bribe all the kids in the neighborhood to do manual labor for me.”

Austin and his wife returned to Wisconsin and have settled in north Appleton, but he still does work for Hasbro.

“Right now I’m working on Capt. America. He’s back. Their working on the movie,” Austin said.

Mini Weapons is Austin’s third book. It was preceded by Prank University and Cubicle Warfare.

“When I worked on Cubicle Warfare I found references to some of these weapons,” he said. “A lot of these weapons are based on real-life counterparts. I saw a picture of a giant Viking catapult and thought, I can easily build that out of No. 2 pencils.”

But it is the Siege Catapult on the cover – made out of clothespins, rubber bands, popsicle sticks, binder clips, duct tape, a plastic spoon and mini-marshallows to fire – that is Austin’s personal favorite.

“I didn’t find anything like it anywhere. It shoots like 25 feet. It’s a good representation of a real catapult and it’s all mine,” he said. “When I was building this, my wife was shaking her head. I’m sitting there with a table full of office supplies and duct tape and I’m launching marshmallows. There was experimentation just like a physics experiment. You tweak it here and there.”

He says you can build the weapons for less than a dollar, and, perhaps an even bigger selling point, “it’s fully illustrated so you don’t have to read it. That’s always a plus.”

Austin said the book is selling so well, the publisher – Chicago Review Press – has asked him to do a sequel.

“Now I have to dig out the old office supplies and start putting things together,” he aid.

But first he has to finish his next book, an illustrated orientation guide for new zombies.

“Zombies are huge,” Austin said. “I’m not starting the next mini-weapons book until I finish the zombie book. It’s a new zombie orientation guide – how to hunt, attack and feed on a human. Kind of a different spin on zombies.”

For more on Austin and his work, johnaustinbooks.com.