The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification Paperback – October 30, 2023

Written like a field guide to, I don’t know, birds or minerals. The pictures are good and the text is hilarious. The author has developed a classification system which is easy to learn and highlights the differences as well as the similarities between seemingly identical list shopping carts. It really adds another dimension to my shopping cart observations.

I'm just about to review this book in my Substack newsletter "The Science of Creativity" and I realized I hadn't reviewed it yet on Amazon. I loved this book! Here's what I said in my newsletter: "This is a hard book to describe. When you first look at the cover, you think it’s a clever art-world joke. Then you open it, and page through it, and you’ll think, someone spent a really large amount of time on this silly parody of the art world. And when you start actually looking at the pictures, and start reading the accompanying text, you’ll realize this is a brilliant work of art. It is sui generis and I don’t use that term often. It’s my favorite book by a photographer. The parody-like nature of the prose is part of the experience. Actually, it’s not parody—it’s more like the performance of a character. As the photographer/author put it, “I realized that the voice of the project needed to be someone other than myself, another Julian Montague who was a taxonomist solely focused on categorizing stray shopping carts."

Wow. Just Wow. I am neither a “Shopping Cart Aficionado” nor a “Data Analyst”, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The simple premise of gathering tremendous amounts of data on such a ubiquitous object is amazing in itself. Pairing that with high quality photos of subject matter “in the wild” presents a fascinating piece of literature. The various methods utilized to organize the vast amount of data (grouped frequency distribution, systemic naming, etc.) is simply remarkable. Bravo!

The amount of obsession that went into this is incredibly impressive, and I approve.The classification system really works.

This book is set up to be a scientific guide to something so very absurd. Having grown up in central New Jersey in the 70s, some of the pictures hit very close to home - so to speak. And my husband's first job as a 14 year old was rounding up stray shopping carts for the A&P in Fords, NJ. I believe this book may have caused some unpleasant, although 'laugh out loud', flashbacks for him. Everyone who looks at it has the same reaction - laughter, and the realization that this is happening on so frequent a basis that an entire book can be devoted to it.

bought this for the absurdity of the title. SO glad i did! now i walk around everywhere, and try to categorize the stray shopping carts i find in the wild. this was such a great and quirky idea :)

I have to imagine that the author took pictures of stray shopping carts for several years and then had to come up with some premise to make them interesting to other people. The result is a detailed and meticulous system for classifying shopping carts, first by their relationship to their source store, then by what has happened, or been done, to them to make them something other than simple shopping carts.A non-stray shopping cart is one that is in the store, or in the store parking lot, and being used by customers to transport goods. A false stray is a shopping cart that on store property but being used for some other purpose, damaged, or a cart that is just outside of store property and will soon be returned to normal use.True strays are not on, or near, their source property, and are unlikely to be returned to proper use.The author has come up with a detailed system of classifying carts depending on their condition, use, and location relative to their source.The book has five sections and an appendix. The first section is the introduction which explains the classification system. The second section illustrates and explains all the class A types (False Strays). The third section illustrates and explains all the class B types (True Strays). The fourth section is a collection of photographs of stray shopping carts tagged with their classifications. Section five is a detailed photographic essay of a stray shopping carts that have been dumped down a particular cliff in the Niagara Falls River Gorge. It is a very professional analysis of the vandalism of this particular site, with site diagrams and explanations of where the carts come from and why they end up there. The appendix is one page discussing the related phenomena of plastic bags, discarded tires, and stray traffic cones.

What a gem of a book! Comments here did not disappoint. I’ll never look at shopping carts the same way again.