#Extinct A Compendium of Obsolete Objects

[thoughtportal]

Extinct A Compendium of Obsolete Objects

[azspot]

Slessor’s short essay on the ashtray appears in the new book Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, a collection of illustrated essays on eighty-five objects that, its editors write, “once populated the world and do so no longer.” To skim its table of contents is to encounter a wide-ranging catalog of lost things: all-plastic houses, cab fare maps, chatelaines, flying boats, moon towers, paper dresses, slide rules, UV-radiated artificial beaches, zeppelins. It is pointedly open-ended, inclusive of infrastructure and architecture as well as personal effects. The only unifying criterion is what its editors term “extinction,” in a self-conscious nod to Darwin-inflected evolutionary theories of technological innovation. “When things disappear, they do so, it is implied, because of their own inadequacy or their unsuitedness to their conditions. Part of the purpose of this book is to probe and question this seeming inevitability,” they write in the introduction. The word “extinct” also connotes something else, more poignant than “obsolescent”: a nod to the kind of death that can happen to our things. It is a loss more profound than many of our words for it—waste, breakage, consumption, discarding—convey. Extinct takes these material losses seriously and tries to quantify the social effects wrought by the wholesale disappearance of particular objects.

[quotidiantimes]

From the 'Clapper' to arsenic wallpaper, why objects go extinct

From the ‘Clapper’ to arsenic wallpaper, why objects go extinct

Written by Megan C. Hills The “Clapper”, literal snail mail, anti-gravity underwear — there are reasons why all of these objects are extinct. But now, a new book is exhuming them from the trash heap of history. In “Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects,” a team of professors, historians, artists and curators seeks to understand why various objects became “obsolete,” and what this tells us…