“A Great Game is afoot, and expeditioning by intermunicipal subterranean railways, by occasional sundry other conveyances, as well as deep within the bowels of innumerable boutique cafés, this excursionist will not rest until he has arrived at the very source of that Greatness itself.” From A Tale of Seven Cities Remade to Measure

Enter a parallel universe of alternative imperial modernism, resistances, and trappings of peculiar material culture. Mahometan & Celestial’s Encyclopædic Guide to Modernity, Comprising a Manual of Useful Instruction Essential to Attainment of the Urbane by the Savage, the Barbarous, and the Semi-Civilized Alike, is an incomparable compendium of expeditionary reports, exhibited artifacts and concise aphoristic parables that charts the most direct and unfailing course to the modern, meticulously presented so as to be readily comprehensible to any reader no matter how putatively backward or decadent. By means of careful attention to and assiduous application of the lessons contained within this guide, the diligent reader is categorically guaranteed to reap the benefit of metropolises and entrepôts relieved of such troublesome nuisances as foreign gunboats, financiers, missionaries, and the like.

Included in the book is A Tale of Seven Cities Remade to Measure, where human geographer Steven Flusty narrates a ruthless competition among cities to become the next Great City. Weaving fictional accounts of the urban experience with graphic 19th century artifacts and parables, the authors have created a highly critical yet engaging work about the contemporary global city.

Steven Flusty is the nom de plume of Tepan Fyodorovich “Hezârfenzade” İfritoğlu Yoldaş-Paşa, noted metropolographer and founder of the Constantinopolitan aëronautical concern Tophane Çelebifabrikası. In conjunction with the celebrated natural historian, polar expeditionist and larval vivisectionist Dr. Celeste Tian, who under the pseudonym of Pauline C. Yu assisted extensively with the preparation of this volume, he is also co-proprietor of the firm Mahometan & Celestial LLC, a foremost purveyor of modernization to crowned heads the world over since the 18th of October 1860.

Flusty is author of books including De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from Inside Out (Routledge, 2004) and Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography (Oxford: Backwell Publishers, 2001), co-edited with Michael Dear. Yu was awarded Post-doctoral Fellow by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Program where she studied “Effects of ocean acidification on developmental physiology of the Antarctic sea urchin, Sterechinus neumayeri.”

UR06

208 pages, full color, paperback, 8” x 11”,
ISBN 978-0-9960041-5-2, printed in the United States, 2016.

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