Here’s an example of what happens when an artist/graphic designer with a thing for scientific classification turns his discriminating eye to our urban pollution of Shopping Carts. Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America, The: A Guide to Field Identification By Julian Montague As described on the publisher’s site as

A must-have for anyone with a passion for shopping carts and a love of the great outdoors: This field guide introduces a groundbreaking classification system for abandoned shopping carts. Accompanied by photographic documentation of actual stray cart sightings, this unique guide depicts the diversity of an often overlooked phenomenon. On close examination, readers inevitably begin to see these carts as human, at times poignant in their abandoned, decrepit state, hilariously incapacitated, or ingeniously co-opted. At once rigorous and absurd, this book allows the layperson to identify and classify their own cart encounters, based on the situation in which the carts were found.

So i was flipping through this at a bookstore in Berkeley yesterday, and i couldn’t stop laughing, while simultaneously being made more aware of the impact and spread of shopping carts on our world! To imagine that this was merely a sampling of New England is horrifying when you scale it to what it must be like around the world. Anyhow the graphic design, photography, and layout were as playfully done as the subject matter, so it is definitely worth taking a look at.