Reading Copy Book Blog

A few weeks ago, AbeBooks.com discovered a book by Julian Montague called The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Field Guide to Classification. We thought it was a joke – who in their right mind would write a book as crazy as this? However, 30 minutes on the telephone with Julian reveals there is, in fact, considerable method and also art in his apparent madness.

Julian is an artist from Buffalo, New York. He has studied and photographed stray shopping carts since 1999 when a magazine featured his artistic take on something many people consider an urban blight. He has staged several art exhibitions on the subject in Buffalo, New York City, Hartford, Connecticut, and Cleveland, Ohio. Last year he published The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America through Abrams – one of North America’s major publishers of art books. Even the New York Times has taken note of his unique project with an article entitled “Abandoned: The Art of the Cart.”

At the heart of the book is a classification system to describe the abandoned states of shopping carts. Dozens of photographs – some mundane, some startling, some distinctly sad - are used to explain each classification. The cart dumped in a river, the cart abandoned by the side of the road two miles from its supermarket, the cart being used for another purpose, the vandalized cart and so on.

“It all began as a conceptual art project that was a sad commentary on urban life,” said Julian, who won the book deal from Abrams after someone from the publishing company saw his shopping cart artwork.

“I’m a graphic designer by trade and designed the book myself,” he said. “However, one problem is that bookstores don’t know where to place the book. For instance, Barnes & Noble listed it under humor and really its art.

“I care very deeply about this subject and I don’t mind being called a lunatic – I know this project has humor. Everybody sees and knows shopping carts. They can all identify with shopping carts – even when they have been thrown into a pond or simply vandalized. In Buffalo, we get a lot of snow and they often get buried in drifts and then the plow comes along and crushes them as it clears the snow. Another category is naturalization where they buried in silt.”

But why shopping carts?

“I am interested in my environment,” he said. “Shopping carts are useful and often get appropriated for other uses. There are lots of shopping bags being blown about but no one picks them up and uses them for something. Shopping carts go on journeys and it’s possible to find carts from stores that closed 13 years ago. I get a really positive reaction from people – they are recognizing something from their environment.

“The most bizarre situation I’ve seen is a cart that had been thrown down into a creek, and then pinned under a tree that had been chewed down by a beaver, and then somebody had thrown a large dead dog in a bag down into the creek as well.”

The Bookseller magazine in the UK is currently holding a contest to discover the weirdest book of 2006 and Julian’s Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America is one of the contenders. You can vote by going to www.thebookseller.com

It’s possible to get a flavor of Julian’s shopping cart art by going to www.strayshoppingcart.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under AbeBooks, art, author, books, odd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.