The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America

[beige_alert]

I found a wonderful book while browsing today, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague. The book describes a ludicrously complicated taxonomy of abandoned, vandalized, destroyed, or misplaced shopping carts, illustrated with several hundred high-quality photographs of carts in various settings. It is wonderful in a deeply weird way. The categories include such things as A/3 Bus Stop Discard, B/10 Plow Crush, B/13 Complex Vandalism, and B/20 Bulldozed. The Selected Specimens photos have hilariously detailed captions such as "This B/17 REMOTE GROUP appears to be the result of multiple acts of B/16 EDGE MARGINALIZATION originating from an adjacent municipal housing project where numerous B/4 ON/AS PERSONAL PROPERTY carts can be found regularly."

The whole concept of the book is somewhere in that fuzzy area encompassing prank, art project, parody, actual semi-serious study, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I find it deeply appealing and hilarious.

Needless to say, I've gone back to my flickr photos of abandoned shopping carts to add classification notations, and I'll be on the lookout for carts to photograph and add to my collection.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

That's awesome. I should start dragging my camera along on bike rides. It's always odd to find a shopping cart four miles from the nearest sign of human habitation.