Mongo, Adventures in Trash
“It’s delightfully weird, and thought-provoking enough to make you consider panning through garbage for gold.”
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“Botha has focused his book on a substratum of ‘street-smart’ adventurers, … The world mongo refers to discarded items that have been retrieved, or rescued, from the ash heap of consumer culture: furniture, rugs, glass bottles, toys, even snuff boxes – much of the stuff found every weekend at neighborhood flea markets.”
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“Botha knows what he’s talking about. … Each of his book’s ten chapters is devoted to a different type of mongo hunter, from pack rats who stockpile almost anything to specialists in museum-quality architectural relics. There are high-minded ecologists who can’t stand waste, militant anarchists for whom scrounging is a protest against consumerism, and visionaries who find aesthetic beauty – or create it – out of Dumpster detritus. … Most mongo hunters have stories about similarly amazing finds. Steven Dixon is a book collector who pays nothing for anything but has sold a copy of Ian Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, for $1,000; another time, he came across first editions of Finnegan’s Wake and You Can’t Go Home Again lying right next to each other in the trash.”
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“Botha, who decorated his Manhattan apartment with discards when he moved there from South Africa, claims that New York has the world’s best mongo. … The gleaners are unforgettable: Mr. Murphy, who makes $10,000 each summer collecting cans at Central Park’s SummerStage; Dave Sludge, who once found a tricorn from the Revolutionary War, later valued at $9,000, in a landfill; or Charles, who collects pieces of ‘unwanted buildings,’ This is recycling as art form. It is also political: a statement against waste, a vote for the old versus the new. As one street collector puts it, ‘Garbage isn’t in the eye of the beholder but in the way you arrange it.’”
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“Mongo, Adventures in Trash is Botha’s paean to the garbage foragers of New York. … He is interested not in button-down dilettantes who boast of rescuing potted ferns off Waverly Place, but in the full-time mongo devotees who sift through the trash as profession or vocation. In New York, it seems, collectors are as surprising and multifarious as the treasures they unearth. … Megapolitans eager to learn about the seamy underbelly of Manhattan should certainly consult Mongo, a work of urban reportage packed with arcane trivia and entertaining revelations. Once you know about mongo, you start to notice it everywhere; and once you know about the subculture of people dedicated to the pursuit of mongo, you remember to marvel at what an odd, amazing city you’ve washed up in.”
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“I came to Botha’s Mongo, Adventures in Trash as a true believer in the old saying at premise behind his book: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And after reading his tale of trash, I remain one. … Botha uncovered not just a book about stuff, but a collection of interesting, funny – and sometimes heartbreaking – tales of people who not only collect mongo but represent the spirit behind it.”
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“I’ve never been one to peruse or compile year-end ‘best of’ lists, but I must say that one of my favorite reads this year was Botha’s Mongo, Adventures in Trash, and I feel a need to share that. I need to share it because I want more people to read it and to think about what they use and what they throw away and what they overlook. … Such a treat to read.”
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Facing the Dead
The narrative thread of real-life crime
Botha's 'Girl With the Crooked Nose' is dead-on
