Recycled

By Charlotte Cooper
www.charlottecooper.net


This zine takes the odd decision to use the paper size of...A3? Whatever the UK version of 11 x 17 paper is. It's odd because there's no real reason to do so. The zine is folded down to half size, and all the pages are laid out as such. On the flip side there's some art in the margin, but the pages could have been rearranged so you didn't need to do that. Strange. Perhaps Cooper just didn't want to staple anything.

But enough about the design, what about the content? In her intro Cooper says that she's been writing zines for years and that this one is a collection of stuff from previous zines. I'm not sure if they're from zines that were actually distributed, or ones she made but never gave to anyone. I guess it doesn't really matter since I've never read any of them before.

The pieces come from all the way back in 1997 up until May of this year when this zine was made (though it took me ages to figure this out, I really had no idea what the numbers next to the titles meant. 5.10? 10.00? What on earth do those mean? Oh wait, month and then day in a nonsensical format, of course...), and talk about Cooper's band (where they members had "no intention of practising or learning musical craft", removed the strings they didn't need from their guitars, and learned a grand total of one song), old pets, relationships, the perfect day, and some weird art piece in the middle of nowhere in Norway.

I like the idea of reprinting things from older zines, especially if they represented important parts of your life. But the pieces Cooper has choosen don't seem to be presented in any specific order, and as there is no additional information (except in one case), I kind of wondered why she choose these pieces and what happened after each of them (did her band ever perform their one song?).