The China Shop Pictures ranges widely in time, space and subject matter, encompassing Jacobite wine glasses, pedagogical horses, a Japanese invention for walking on water, and a medley of viewpoints both famous and anonymous-from Virgil and Gérard de Nerval to a woman who's in love with "the monkey they left on the moon" and a man who complains (unfairly) to a sales assistant that the umbrella he's bought has a design fault.