The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
by Julian Montague
Julian Montague noticed something that everyone sees and nobody thinks about: abandoned shopping carts, scattered across urban and suburban landscapes like metal tumbleweeds.
Instead of ignoring them, he spent years developing a formal classification system.
The book presents shopping cart abandonment events as ecological phenomena. There are primary strays, secondary strays, and super strays. There are carts abandoned due to “intentional short-distance relocation” versus “complex strays” that have clearly been on a journey. Each type has habitat notes, behavioral patterns, and photographic documentation.
The photographs are, improbably, beautiful. The taxonomy is, implausibly, coherent. The whole thing reads like a naturalist’s field guide to a species that no one thought to name before.
It is either a very good art project pretending to be a book, or a very sincere book that accidentally became art. Either way, it is one of the most earnest objects ever published, and you will immediately start noticing stray carts everywhere you go.
Consider this your warning.