SERENDIPITY

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE OBJECT

Fall 2024 | Reaktion Books | 224 pages | 87 Illustrations, 78 in colour

An exploration of the sadness, as well as the joy, of unexpected discoveries in history and life.

Carol Mavor’s first “happy accident” occurred in 1980 when visiting New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favored by Andy Warhol. Mavor’s memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate became food for thought, nurturing accidental discoveries about art and literature.

This book’s happy, yet dark, accidents include Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War; Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes, hidden in a drawer; and Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra.

Mavor’s writing is dependent on serendipity’s layers of happenstance, rousing feelings of something that she did not exactly know she was looking for until she found it. All history is about loss, and in the case of this book, much of it is tragic—but Serendipity also offers the happiness that can be found in unexpected discoveries.

“Two patron saints hover over Carol Mavor’s allusive Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object: Andy Warhol and Horace Walpole. Both men were indefatigable collectors. The fright-wigged Pop artist stored everything from Studio 54 invites to a piece of Caroline Kennedy’s birthday cake in cardboard ‘time capsules’. The foppish Georgian novelist stuffed his Gothick house, Strawberry Hill, with 4,000 objects, from Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat to a Chinese goldfish bowl in which his cat, Selima, drowned. The former commandeered a dessert café called Serendipity 3 in the early 1960s. The latter invented the very word. And the fact their surnames almost rhyme? Pure chance, I’m sure. The emeritus professor at Manchester University assembles six essays on ‘the chance observation falling on a receptive eye’. The poems Emily Dickinson scrawled on envelopes lead by memories and association to Marcel Duchamp’s glass ampoule and, via healthy doses of Roland Barthes, to a walnut deposited at London’s Foundling Museum. The reader finds himself juggling dead hares and Anne Frank’s diary.” — Damian Thompson, World of Interiors, ‘One of the year’s best illustrated non-fiction’

“Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object is like wind. Rushing, it blows air into crevices and corners, mingling and affecting; rustling. Serendipity, like strong winds, collides objects, found, post-gust, with limbs intermingled, evidence of their play. Mavor’s writing in and through Serendipity is best put, in the book’s introduction, as ‘a productive bumping into’.” — Theodore Anderson, Newcity Lit

“Mavor’s Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object includes collecting among its interests, but Mavor is mainly tuned into our moments of discovery, ‘by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of’, and later, of ‘finding something that you did not exactly know you were looking for until you found it’. A widely published professor of art history, Mavor experiences serendipitous moments while gazing at artworks and artifacts, and while writing allusive, bounding essays about creative thought. So when she considers Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St. Matthew (1602) and the angel hovering over the startled saint who is trying to write something, the angel who passes freely between two worlds, she is also enacting the role of the angel, a liminal ‘middle voice’ between writer and reader, the past and the now.” — Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“Welcoming us into the afterlife of the happy accident, Carol Mavor’s poetic ruminations reveal a cavalcade of surprising connections between a diverse array of images and objects. In the process, Serendipity reflects on the magical power of writing itself, on the capacity of the learned essayist to take us on dizzying flights of fancy and into profound depths of understanding.”
— Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford