Extinct

Extinct takes the long and often absurdist view. There are mad things we don’t miss – arsenic wallpaper (vivid but deadly) – and things we miss every twenty minutes: ashtrays (deadly but vivid). … I miss memos. I crave the Polaroid SX-70 … and I wish I had a serving hatch in my sitting room because then I’d feel properly middle class. * Andrew O'Hagan, LRB *
Inventions that calamitously failed or quietly faded into obscurity are brought back to life in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects. A team of nearly eighty scholars wrote the eighty-five alphabetical entries, from arsenic-laced wallpaper that poisoned Victorian families to exploding zeppelins. Among the once-humdrum goods that have become collectibles are ashtrays, paper airplane tickets, slide rules and vertical filing cabinets. And there are technologies now predominantly confined to museums, like pneumatic tubes for delivering mail, and pyrophones, musical instruments with piano keys controlling miniature burners inside glass tubes that emit melancholic whispers. The book also profiles follies that never reached the market: anti-gravitation underclothing designed to keep wearers aloft and telegraph mechanisms that relied on snails slithering around zinc bowls to tap out letters. * Eve Kahn, New York Times *

Extinct: A Compendium Of Obsolete Objects is a book so far up our street it might as well move in . . . across
85 illustrated essays it tells the stories of “extinct” inventions . . . Buy this brilliant book now.

* Electronic Sound Magazine *
This fascinating book covers 85 extinct objects, small and large, with a short essay on each by academics, architects and curators. Highly informative and very entertaining. * Fortean Times *
this new book from Reaktion is a delight to peruse. Rather than mocking the failed, superseded or outmoded, it is more of a celebration of 85 extinct objects and the visions that drove them, as nominated by a range of historians, curators, architects, academics and artists . . . The featured objects are a wonderful selection. * The RIBA Journal *
Remember audio cassettes, paper airline tickets, Polaroid cameras and fountain pens? Extinct is a wonderful compendium of objects that are past their prime, but evoke nostalgia not derision. The four editors discuss eighty-five objects and the visions that drove them. The book leaves you wondering which of the objects we use today will be part of a book like this in the near future. * The Hard Copy, India "Books of 2021" *
Writing, Schalansky theorizes, is not resurrection, “but it can enable everything to be experienced.” The best essays in Extinct manage this, bringing the ashtray and the tragedy of arsenic wallpaper and the strange floodlights of streets lit by moon towers not quite to life but into the realm of our imagined experience . . . Extinct is also a beautiful object in its own right: hardcover, with a colorful cover illustration of a cassette tape, and rich photographs and drawings that accompany the essays. * The Baffler *
An innovation that seemed life changing in one era might seem ridiculous or useless – or even deadly – in another. This illustrated cavalcade of inventions highlights the rise (and fall) of such things as the Concorde, arsenic wallpaper, pneumatic tubes, and flying cars. * MIT Technology Review *
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 about the worlds they existed in. Modern technology now moves at a lightning pace, with endless updates to phones, cameras, and other gadgets. But the book's authors hope to challenge the assumption that things disappear due to "inadequacy" or "unsuitedness to their conditions." From the defunct to the superseded, from the failed to the visionary, there can be many reasons why an invention no longer serves a purpose. * CNN Style *
A fascinating and curious read. It is host to accounts, conclusions, and warnings from the ghosts of deceased inventions and their often-haunting lives that float on beyond the grave. The authors use natural selection and evolution as an analogy to the birth, death, mutation, and rebirth of designed or ideated objects as they cycle through their usefulness and ultimate obsolescence. * departmentofinformation.org *
A truly fascinating and consistently unexpected account of a forgotten landscape of lost futures. This richly original work chronicles the designed world of the undead and, at the same time, challenges today’s easy consensus of progress and modernisation. Entertaining, jolting, and scholarly it is a superb counter-blast to our own age of relentless upgrades and product improvements. * Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London *
This is a wonderfully curious book about how the ghosts of extinct inventions live on, not just in our minds but in the world around us. It is strangely addictive to discover how the epitaphs of these technologies form the blueprints of our future. * Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World *
Objects have come and gone from our lives throughout history, mostly because something new has been designed to fulfil their functions more efficiently, appealingly, economically or sustainably. Never before has this happened with such speed or on the same scale as in the digital age. Extinct is both a thoughtful and incisive analysis of the phenomenon and an engaging tribute to some of the intriguing or eccentric objects we have lost in design’s equivalent of natural selection. * Alice Rawsthorn, author of Design as an Attitude *
Extinct is an intoxicating exploration of a host of objects, systems and protocols that are no longer in use or never made it. They are design ghosts, actively haunting the present and conjuring up alternative nested futures. Each short story becomes epic. This brilliant book is a survey of the future rather than of the past. * Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, Princeton University *