I like trash as much as the next girl.

And kitchen junk, like poxy pastel Tupperware, rusted baking tins and tatty old aprons turns my crank quite a lot.

That’s why I love the book Kitchen Junk, by American junk queen Mary Randolph Carter (Penguin Group, Viking Studio, 1999). The third book in Carter’s “junk trilogy” – proceeded by American Junk and Garden Junk – shows how, in the right hands, piles of crap can be works of art. Sometimes functional ones. Just because I can’t do it, doesn’t mean I don’t believe.

Read on for an interview with the irrepressible Mary Randoph Carter and a book review.

Kitchen Junk by Mary Randolph Carter

“Kitchen Junk” nestles arty photos of Carter’s flea-market kitchen finds together with short essays, bits of history and personal stories. She’s a professional photographer, by the way, who insists that her day job as VP of advertising for designer Ralph Lauren isn’t much different than her passion for junk.

“Even though I don’t go out and shoot junk in our advertisements, Ralph’s vision has always been one of personal style. Junk and Polo intersect at that that level.”

Mary Randolph Carter’s Book Gives Tips on Restoring Old Collectibles and Navigating Flea Markets

In her book, Carter sets up thematic fantasy kitchens – sometimes shooting real ones – loaded with stuff she and her friends have collected. There’s the Chicken Coop, chock full of things like a $4 Mexican paper mache hen, a $2 hen potholder, and a chicken clipboard for $1.50. Tin Pan Alley celebrates “cheap and easy to collect” cookie tins.

My favorite section is probably Kitchen Aids with its sleek old Kitchenaid blenders and chrome toasters gleaming in a row like so many Airstream trailers. Or the Matador’s Breakfast with colorfully romantic flowered tableware, Jesus pictures and ceramic fruit.

Excepting the furniture, not much in Carter’s book costs over 20 clams.

Kitchen Junk Gives Tips on Restoring Junk

And for folks who celebrate spring more for the lawn sales than the flowers, there are hints on:

• how to treat old metal bakeware
• how to clean up tarnished silver
• how to get stains out of ancient linen.

Part of the book’s charm is that Carter herself is truly obsessed. She gives detailed histories of objects. (“Rusty remnants of table cutlery dug up from the time of the War between the States touched some nerve in my Southern soul as I gazed at them tossed helter-skelter in a box at D’s Place in Gloucester Virginia… I rescued these for 50 cents apiece…”). There are photos of her “junk scrapbooks”, where she records the date and prices of her finds. And snaps of Carter wearing the fisherman’s vest she loads up with small change, a magnifying glass and handiwipes, ever ready to wipe the scum off a diamond in the rough.

Flea Market Shopping is the New Green

She still cries about the ones that got away from flea markets over the years.

“One of the things I have learned is to do a couple of runs around a flea market, and if there’s something you pause by three times, buy it or you’ll regret it. There were some pink flamingos that I lost one time. I think about them to this day.”

From $1 dust pans to $3 sqeezie mustard and ketchup bottles, Carter seems to truly love it all – voluntary simplicity be damned.

“I have lots of things that don’t work,” Carter explains, “But you have to understand it may not work as it was intended to but it works for me on a different level. What’s wrong with that?”

Though it may be a slippery slope from what Carter calls collecting to what shrinks call obsessive compulsive disorder, this book really appeals to my eco-sense which tells me that there’s already plenty-o-stuff in this world. Instead of making or buying more kitchen junk, Carter’s book makes a tasty argument that it not only be much “greener,” but far more hip to just use up what we’ve already got.