Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America

Julian Montague

ell, everyone has to have a hobby. Julian Montague's is taking pictures of old shopping carts. This book consists mainly of visually appealing pictures of carts in their natural habitats: drainage ditches, among the bushes, or graffiti-filled low rent districts around Buffalo, N.Y.

Montague has devised a unique descriptive taxonomic classification that categorizes carts in terms of their appearance, such as Plow Crushed, Train Damaged, and Bus Stop Discard. (This taxonomic scheme has yet to gain acceptance among cartographers.)

It's an amusing idea. Still, it would have been nice to include some actual information about shopping carts. For example, most people don't know that the Model 586 is one of the largest carts in production, with a capacity of 18,000 cubic inches. It is the true Cadillac among shopping cart connoisseurs worldwide. True shopping cart aficionados will also be dismayed by the fact that there is no mention of Sylvan Nathan Goldman (1898-1984), the inventor of the shopping cart, whose name is revered among all true cartologists.

Academics, too, will be crushed to learn that Montague completely overlooks the brilliant cartographic research of Ida Hartja-Koch of Myrn Bawr College, whose Master's thesis on shopping carts titled "Gender discrimination and shopping cart design: a steel cage of crushing phallocentric oppression by the patriarchal oligarchy" is considered the authoritative work on the sociodynamics of shopping carts. Hartja-Koch considered the shopping cart to be an iconic symbol of imprisonment, a cage aux folles so to speak in which the modern female spirit is imprisoned by bourgeois capitalist technology.

This book is a cute idea that is good for about ten minutes of mild amusement (twenty if you write a book review on it). We will be awaiting impatiently to see if Montague devises a similar classification scheme for telephone poles and trash dumpsters. They will be eagerly anticipated by trashologists everywhere.