"The Timewaster Letters"

The Timewaster Letters, by Robin Cooper, isn’t your typical non-fiction novel. In fact, it’s exactly what the title proclaims it to be: letters from a seemingly professional timewaster to various companies, clubs, and political parties. Whether Cooper is requesting a wax statue of himself from Madame Tussaud’s in London or sending rough sketches of a bed/shelf-unit design to IKEA, he’s doing it with his tongue firmly in his cheek.

1. I recommend you read this book for these two reasons:

Firstly, The Timewaster Letters is hilarious. The whole idea around it, and the fact that one man with too much time on his hands can send all these letters for who knows what reasons, is just so out-there and absurd that you can’t help but laugh at it. Who would try to enroll their daughter in the armed forces for “failing to make sufficiently ‘fluffy’ meringues”? Who would write a poem dedicated to the Aluminium Foil Container Manufacturers' Association? Answer to both of the above: Robin Cooper. Secondly, part of the comedy in this book comes from not just his letters, but from the responses to them as well. Some are along the lines of “sorry, but we are not what you are looking for”. Others dismiss his letters as silly, and ask that he “[does] not send any further correspondence (such as the British Colour Makers Association, in which Cooper claims to have invented a new colour called “greem” – that’s with an M at the end, not an N). There are even a few letters from Cooper that are never answered in the first place, probably because of how completely pointless they are. There’s clearly a fine line between “funny” and “ridiculous”, and Cooper manages to stay on that line without wavering to either side.

4. The opening or closing shot of a movie based on this book would look like this for these reasons:

Creating a movie based on this book would honestly be very tricky in my opinion, but it could be done. If I were to direct this, I would have it begin with the initial response to Cooper’s first letter. This first letter, where he writes to Windrush Mill Garden Catalogue about his Roman Empire-inspired scarecrows made from beef, is responded to politely, with a request to see photos or sketches of these scarecrows. We don’t know what the staff must have thought upon reading the letter at first, of course, but I think that seeing the obvious disbelief, confusion, and skepticism in them would result in an amusing start to a most likely amusing movie.