Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects ed. by Barbara Penner et al. (review)

Ever since Neil MacGregor published A History of the World in 100 Objects in 2010 as a joint project between the British Museum and BBC Radio 4, there have been imitators. Richard Kurin upped the ante by one to tell The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects. Adrian Hon took a futuristic account in A New History of the Future in 100 Objects, in which he imagined a curator in the year 2082 writing an object-based book as a fictional commentary of the twenty-first century.

With Extinct, editors Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner, and Miranda Critchley go in a different direction. Unbound by geography or chronology or even the round number of one hundred (they feature eighty-five objects), Extinct is a collection of individual essays from the mundane and ubiquitous (T-shirt plastic bag) to the truly unique (Cybersyn). Although the editors collectively refer to the case studies as objects, they acknowledge in the introduction that the essays include tools, equipment, structures, and infrastructures related to modern life. All of the essays follow a similar pattern: a single main image, three pages of text, and a possible secondary image. Arranged in alphabetical order with each essay standing on its own, there is no need to read the book linearly from beginning to end. It is just as much fun to open the book to a page and start reading as it is to go from one essay to the next trying to make connections.

And connections do exist. The overall project is a commentary on technological progress. The delightful introduction, authored by all four editors, begins with a quote from Charles Darwin explaining natural selection as a tendency "to progress towards perfection." Acknowledging the challenges in applying a natural phenomenon to human-made objects, the authors then unfold a lovely literature review, from Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization through Sigfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command to David Edgerton's Shock of the Old, weaving together theories from history, industrial design, and economics.

Extinct is a slippery word, especially considering some of the objects have never truly disappeared, and so the editors propose six different categories of extinction: "failed" (such as the Concorde) for objects that are truly dead; "superseded" (Kodak Flashcube) for objects that have lost out in technological evolution to more advanced or efficient objects; "enforced" (Fisher-Price peg figures) for items whose end came by way of government policy or regulatory bodies; "defunct" (optical telegraph) for items that never took off or fell victim to changing tastes; "aestivated" (Chinese dougong) for objects that became extinct but were later revived in a new fashion; and finally "visionary" (Edison's anti-gravitation underclothing) for experimental prototypes that fell victim to constraints such as cost, politics, imagination, or reality.

The only nod to these interesting categories of extinction is a grayscale label in the footer under each essay. It would have been logical to organize the book along these typologies, but I applaud the editors for sticking to their alphabetical order. I suspect it would be boring to read a dozen examples of superseded technologies in a row; it is much more engaging to ponder the different reasons objects go extinct with unexpected juxtapositions of time and place.

Within the academic realm, individual essays could be assigned at any level of undergraduate or graduate studies in courses on the history of technology, design, or economics. As a whole, the book could be used in material culture or museum studies courses to inspire future curators, though it does not provide the typical close readings of the objects or explain how to situate them within different exhibits, instead opting to explore their broader social and cultural significance. Beyond the academy, I could see this book as a lovely gift for anyone who has a predilection for collecting. Extinct is a beautiful book—the photographs are captivating, and the essays are insightful...