The Story of Trash Bin Zine Rescued from the trash bin, bin

Rescued From the Murky Garbage Depths

 

I’m constantly searching for paper. Each week I move from place to place looking for any little nugget, especially free nuggets. The treasure trove of paper is the free bin at a local bookstore. I’ve written about this place over and over, too much. Outside of the free paper, I like interacting with the weridos. You have the old ladies looking for Jesus oriented books, the resellers collecting ancient textbooks they’ll never sell, the two-second lookers, and the wingnuts. Some people sit there all day looking for copies of Lee Iacocca’s autobiography that they stick into a piece of tattered luggage.

From afar, I’m definitely in the wingnut category. If you’re watching, I’m the guy hoping to find hand written notes, molded pieces of paper, antiquated medical images, and Russian children’s books. Clearly, the wingnut category. A few folks have even asked what I was doing. One even asked if I had permission to rip out the empty pages in the front of books. “No,” I said.

All of this gets recycled into a new thing. I take the books home and then cut them up. The weirdest images get scanned and then folded into broadsides or zines months, or years later. Like most collage artists, I have thousands of these sorts of images laying around my upstairs room. The blank pages are used for empty space in collages, I use a lot of these in various states of decay. You would be amazed by the differences between one white sheet of paper from 1896 and one from 1946. When it gets golden spots, it gets beautiful, when it yellows…magnifique. This sort of thing you can’t really buy. Time is the creator.

While digging this week, I found a familiar cover. No, it wasn’t Palin’s autobiography that people give away in droves, but something I made. This has never happened before. What I found was a zine I made earlier in the year. Most of the copies I made were mailed off to people across the United States, maybe 50. Another 50 I dropped in random little libraries around the area, namely the creative reuse shop near my house. Those folks might get what I’m doing. The zine had done some moving around before it got to the free bin. Someone had to pick up a copy, have it with them for a little while, and then put it in the free bin. It traveled! This is about the greatest compliment I could get for my work. I expect most of what I make ends up in piles or in the trash, but this one had to be dealt with. Someone had to pick it up and look at it…it had a function. It lived.

Ironically, the zine was a collection of found images. Most of the images in the zine were found in the exact free bins where I rescued this copy. So much searching was reduced to a handful of scanned images, made into a small zine I printed at work, and then brought home.