The Stray Shopping Carts of North America: A Guide to Field Identification
Julian Montague

There is something innocent about shopping carts, these simple little creatures of commercial conveyance. They are designed for such a limited and single-mined function, to live their lives within one store, and out to a parking lot. But oh how they roam, when commandeered by renegades. They seem to end up all over the city, so common that they are often seen, but hardly noticed, an ethereal, nearly substanceless, ubiquitous urban form, like a pigeon. There is something tragic about the many ways they meet their demise, submerged in fetid urban drainage, or buried in the brush of brownfields. Many of us might have thought about something like this book, but the author, Julian Montague, thought about it the hardest, and then went and did it. Hundreds of images and a tight classification system to aid in identification. (“Class/Type B/20,” for example, is a “true stray” - as opposed to a Class A, a “false stray”- that is “marginalized” and buried by a bulldozer).

Abrams Image, 2006, paperback, 176 pages, many color photographs.