Les Carnets de Rastapopoulos #8

By Robert Gauvin
Les Carnets de Rastopopoulos
2-7 Larch Street
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
K1R 6W4

This is one of the neatest zines I've seen in a while. It's about Gauvin's attempts to get a penpal in the early 1980s. At first he is content to exchange letters with people from penpal organizations, but soon he has a new goal in mind: a penpal "on the other side of the Iron Curtain". In the early '80s this must have seemed super exotic, and also considerably more difficult than finding someone in Denmark to trade letters with.

Gauvin decides to write to the Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian embassies and, much to my surprise, actually gets a response! He writes to some youth organizations in those countries and after several months he finally gets a response! Of course it's in Serbian which isn't too helpful to someone who lives in small town New Brunswick.

And then the next day there are 14 more letters, then 12, then 16... In total Gauvin received about 250 letters (mostly in Serbian), which included photos, Yugoslav dollars, lipstick prints, and cut outs of the original article printed in TV Novosti magazine that said he wanted a penpal.

"There was so much mail suddenly flowing from Yugoslavia to the small obscure rural Atlantic Canadian post office of Bouctouche people along the postal supply chain took notice. This one time a letter arrive in a magnificent colour poster elaborately folded to act as an envelope. There was hardly any trade of my address on the surface. Just "Try Bouctouche" scribbled on it by a postal employee along the postal supply chain. Guessing it belonged with the hordes of correspondance heading to that previously unknown destination point."

Soon after the letters from Yugoslavia begin to dry up, a letter from Czechoslovakia arrives. At first Gauvin is afraid that he'll get hundreds more letters in a language he can't understand, but this time the majority of the letters arrived in French and English. This led to a new problem, how to choose which letters from the hundreds received that should receive replies.

This zine reminded me of getting a penpal letter in a class soon after I moved to Canada. I feel bad because I didn't reply to it because it was from some "boring" girl (I was 8!). I'm much better at responding to mail nowadays.

I thought this zine was cute and funny and I'm looking forward to reading more issues. Plus it has some neat maps in the middle that show all the countries in which Gauvin has had penpals. There are a lot of them!

Maps of America

By Jessica Ross and Ben Gallagher

Maps! I love maps! I've made zines with maps in them! I've made zines that are maps! I look at neat pictures of maps online! There have been times when I've ended up hoarding maps to use in art projects. Why do I like them so much? I guess on maps covering large amounts of geography (like this one) I enjoy the potential for travel, while on maps of cities I love being able to see the whole of an urban environment (there's potential for travel there too!). And in both cases there's the combination of the artistic with the functional.

This is a map of the continental USA that fills a sheet of 11 x 17 paper. It shows the route that Jess and Ben took on their journey through America. The opposite side of the paper has some writing about their trip, and several smaller versions of the map that point out the locations of where they ate Mexican food, went swimming, went dancing, bought bread, and interacted with poets. Neat!

Small World: A Friendship Network Map

By Pearl
PO Box 74
Brighton
BN1 4ZQ
UK

I really love maps, and this is an incredibly interesting one (that is an awesome fold out, in a format I’ve been meaning to use for years, but am too lazy to actually do).

To use a kind of lame analogy, it’s sort of like real world Facebook, showing all of Pearl’s friends, how they’re connected to her, and how they’re connected to each other. Some of the connections are really awesome, with my favourites probably being “[are] friends […] because they’re both scientists” and “is famous, he played Bungle the Bear in Rainbow (a TV Programme)”. But there’s also charm in “used to be in a band with”, “met at a party years ago”, and “lives in same street as”.

Part of me wishes that this was some fancy interactive flash thing or something so that I could click on people’s names and get more information, but that is because I am a huge technology nerd, and really there’s no reason for it, and the whole thing is really cute (though I will more than likely never read what all the connections say as they can be a bit hard to read).

Secret Spots Halifax anti tourism tour

I was super pumped when I found this zine in the Anchor Archive Zine Library. Things to do in Halifax! I've just moved here and don't know where there is anything to do. Plus: maps! I love maps! Sadly, this zine is something of a disappointment.

While it's totally cool that all the information in here is bilingual, it does mean that there's less space for locations to be included, but that's not a big deal. The actual list is a bit disappointing too, though it's not really aimed at me. There's a number of islands and lakes and stuff included, which aren't really things I have any interest in going to see, though I can understand other people finding them interesting, and there _is_ some stuff I thought sounded cool.

However, the real problem with this zine is the map. It's just photocopied from another source with numbers placed on top. It is not designed for the page, and is so dark I can't find where anything noted actually is located. Since the text refrained from including any addresses this becomes an "anti tourism" guide in that it tells you about places you cannot visit, you can only imagine them in your mind. Which, in some cases, might actually be an improvement. I mean, how cool can that lost overpass be?

The Rickiti-Guide to Vagrancy

By Rickitinic
rickitinic.wordpress.com#

Maps! Yay maps!
The centrepiece to this awesome zine about becoming a vagabond is a huge map. And by huge, I mean huuuuuge. It is two big pieces of paper taped together. It is the size of four normal sized pieces of paper! I can’t imagine how long it took to draw something like this. The ocean is filled with wavelike objects, and loads of mountain ranges and deserts are drawn in. It is so big and impressive I can almost forgive them for leaving off loads of islands that I’ve been to (and not just small islands, but big ones!).

The rest of the zine features “what to pack” (I’d personally bring more clothes and less skateboards), a pretty rad picture featuring ten reasons why trains are the best way to travel (maybe not as good as bicycles), a step by step guide to planning your vagrancy, a poem about being a vagrant, and more!

I really enjoyed this. Now to find more zines with maps. Suggest some to me!

Bothy Zine

Bothy Zine
By Mike
A weird square size.

So a bothy (how do I pronounce that?) is apparently a house or hut of some kind that is out in the woods or the countryside or some place and people going on hikes can stay in them. Nobody seems to own them, and they are looked after by the people that visit. That sounds rad! Too bad I had to figure this out by myself, because this zine doesn’t actually tell you and assumes you already have a bunch of knowledge about things that maybe all English people already know. (What’s a beaker person? Is it like this?)

After figuring that out, I still had a bit of a hard time comprehending this zine. There were times when I thought that the pages were out of order, or that some of them were just missing entirely, because there is a narrative here, but it is incredibly jumpy. It goes all over the place, and skips things, and other bits just seem to stop.

This is because the zine is mostly just a straight up reproduction of a journal and sketch book that Mike kept while he was hiking around these places. He flat out states that he was frequently exhausted during this time, after spending entire days hiking through marshes and forests and stuff. So the sketches, notes, and ephemera are at least partially the product of an overtired mind I would think.

The zine would definitely have benefitted from a rewrite. The information contained within is interesting, but the way in which it is presented is just a mess. I know Mike can tell an actual story, because a couple of times he tells about previous trips he had taken, and those make sense.

Some of his sketches are pretty good, and I liked the quotes from the guest books that were left in the bothys (bothies?), I always read those in places to see what people say.

Despite all this, Mike seems like a guy I could get along with, and the zine definitely succeeded on two fronts: it told me these places existed, and it made me want to go visit some! (When it’s warmer.)

Carbon + Carbide #2

Carbon + Carbide #2
By Lisa Cassidy
hipped.net
Quarter sized.

“This is interesting” I thought, reading what I thought was the introduction, “but when is the narrative or real content going to kick in?”

Then I realized that the whole zine was going to be random musings on cities and maps, with brief glances into Cassidy's life. There wasn’t going to be any narrative flow, just a thematic one.

Not that this is a bad thing, I love cities and maps. They play a part in several of my zines, and I even made a guide to Vancouver, Canada that was a huge map of things to do and places to go.

Despite this, I’d never realized that while many maps are about showing boundaries and borders, city maps are about showing “passages and routes between”. For whatever reason, that idea kind of blew my mind. Seeing a map as the roads and paths instead of buildings makes a lot of sense considering we’re more likely to walk or drive along one of those then go into any of the buildings that appear. A map reduced solely to the places you go into would be mostly empty.

Carbon + Carbide isn’t a zine about places, it is about the journeys between places. About getting from point a to point b, whether by bus, bicycle, or foot. About how maps affect our view of a place before we have even seen it.

Now I want to make more maps.