Cover of Junk Mail Origami

Junk Mail Origami is a book by Duy and Tramy Nguyen that sounded great but really disappointed me. I ordered it, thinking it would be a great way to make use of the colorful junk mail that I hate to throw away—sort of recycling it into something fun—cheap origami paper.

Since most origami patterns use square paper, and junk mail is never square, I figured there would be some interesting and useful patterns that could be used with letter-sized paper without tedious trimming. There are, but…

The first disappointment was the size of the book. It is only about 5 x 9 inches, closed. Open it, and you see that it is spiral bound. So the pages are only about 4 inches wide.

It appears that the book illustrations were designed for a larger book, but the publisher decided to make the book small instead. Big mistake.

Worse, most of the illustrations have dark overlays of color, often completely obscuring the now-tiny markings on the illustrations. The publisher has done the authors (and themselves) a real disservice in making the book too small and dark to really work with. Even the index has a dark overlay of color obscuring the tiny text.

The book is not completely useless. There are some folds that I could figure out. And the full price is only $5.95 USD.

Still, Junk Mail Origami could have been a much better book if it had been designed for actual use instead of just to look small and cute.

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