Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Making a case for the abandoned shopping cart as a life force in itself, designer and photographer Julian Montague's updated edition of this 2006 publication is required reading for anyone who's ever been to a grocery store." * Hyperallergic *
“As someone who worked in many grocery stores, chasing down stray carts was both a frustration and delight, depending on the day, or time, or weather. I adore
Stray Shopping Carts not only for its transportive qualities, but for how it reaches for—and achieves—beauty in the examination of an object that is both beautiful and sometimes burdensome.” * Hanif Abdurraqib *
“Montague’s sly masterpiece is back, a Baedeker equal parts Ballard, Borges, and Buffalo, New York. Don’t leave home without it.” * Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams *
“A field guide to shopping carts is really a field guide to shopping: Montague’s poignant classifications reveal the often bleak, sometimes beautiful landscapes in which we acquire and dispose of goods. By the end of the book, the carts come to embody urban brokenness in a deeply human way.” * Alexandra Lange, author of Meet Me by the Fountain *
“One of the funniest books I’ve seen.” * Stefan Sagmeister, graphic designer *
“Montague’s playful taxonomy of urban blight encourages us to look closer, and look differently, at the landscape around us; to take notice, indeed celebrate, that which accumulates in the margins. In accounting for that which is overlooked or framed out, a quiet, humanizing empathy emerges.” * Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners *
“Thoughtfully conceived and beautifully designed, this field guide is a one-of-a-kind example of multidisciplinary engagement and originality. It’s a sociological study as much as it is a sharp eco-cultural critique of our time.” * Giovanni Aloi, School of the Art Institute of Chicago *
“The cover text. . . offers a unique vision of how we classify and understand our urban environment. It is also, of course, a playful look at one aspect of modern capitalism narrowed down to the retail industry.” * Third Coast Review *
"The unquestioned, definitive classification guide to shopping carts found in the wide world beyond their home stores or parking-lot corrals. . . . The project of classifying the carts by their condition and location—'A/2, Plaza Drift,' 'A/3, Bus Stop Discard,' 'B/13, Complex Vandalism'—is brilliantly pointless, a triumph of form without function that nevertheless got me to see my environment in a new way." * Commonweal *
