Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, Revised Edition

A taxonomy we didn’t know we needed for identifying and cataloging stray shopping carts by artist and photographer Julian Montague. Abandoned shopping carts are everywhere, and yet we know so little about them. Where do they come from? Why are they there? Their complexity and history baffle even the most careful urban explorer. Thankfully, artist Julian Montague has created a comprehensive and well-documented taxonomy with The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America. Spanning thirty-three categories from damaged, fragment, and plow crush to plaza drift and bus stop discard, it is a tonic for times defined increasingly by rhetoric and media and less by the plain objects and facts of the real world. Montague’s incomparable documentation of this common feature of the urban landscape helps us see the natural and man-made worlds—and perhaps even ourselves—anew. First published in 2006 to great perplexity and acclaim alike, Montague’s book now appears in refreshed and expanded form. Told in an exceedingly dry voice, with full-color illustrations and photographs throughout, it is both rigorous and absurd, offering a strangely compelling vision of how we approach, classify, and understand the environments around us. A new afterword sheds light on the origins of the project. In The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America author Julian Montague has created an elaborate classification system of abandoned shopping carts, accompanied by photographic documentation of actual stray cart sightings. These sightings include bucolically littered locations such as the Niagara River Gorge (where many a cart has been pushed to its untimely death) and mundane settings that look suspiciously like a suburb near you. Working in the naturalist's tradition, the photographs depict the diversity of the phenomenon and carry a surprising emotional charge; readers inevitably begin to see these carts as human, at times poignant in their abandoned, decrepit state, hilariously incapacitated, or ingeniously co-opted. The result is at once rigorous and absurd, enabling the layperson to identify and classify their own cart spottings based on the situation in which they were found. At the time of this writing it has been 23 years since the research for The Stray Shop-ping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification began, and 16 years since the publication of the first edition of this book. I officially ended this stray shop-ping cart field research in 2007. While the stray shopping cart activity landscape has surely been affected by changes in consumer habits, it is my belief (backed up by anecdotal observation) that the fundamental nature of stray shopping cart activity has not changed. The system laid out in this book is still the best available situational taxonomy for stray shopping carts. For Veronica Contents Preface SECTION 1: Introduction SECTION 2: Class A: False Strays SECTION 3: Class B: True Strays SECTION 4: Selected Specimens SECTION 5: A Simple Vandalism Site Study SECTION 6: A Complex Vandalism Site Study Afterword (2023) Appendix: Related Phenomena