© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

The obscure art of orange wrappers

In old children's books I used to read how oranges were once a favourite Christmas present. I guess that was in the northern hemisphere, in the colder countries where a juicy orange would have been a rare and welcome ambassador from the sunny south. That image struck me again on recent visit to Sweden where, in an antique shop, I found a couple of old school exercise books full of colourful labels. I asked the shopkeeper what the labels were and she told me they were pictures clipped from vintage orange wrappers. I was surprised. When…

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Old envelopes, old businesses

When we first acquired some of the late Ken Magor's vast collection of photographic negatives, many of the negatives were stored in second-hand envelopes that Ken had evidently scavenged from a variety of Newcastle businesses. Ken clearly needed something to store the negatives in, but in the late 1940s - in the wake of the war - many items were in relatively short supply. Ken was a master scavenger and he gathered large quantities of used envelopes from the printer Reg Pognoski, from the retail store Winns and from other sources as they became available. After…

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Putting a label on it: ephemera from all over

Pretty pieces of paper. I like them. So I've made a collection of them, gathered from all sorts of places. I like the artistry of them. Sometimes I see some humour or something peculiar in them that makes me collect them and put them in albums, occasionally to look at. Here's a selection of some of my paper ephemera. Beer labels - all Australian. Some older iterations of products that are still around, and some others not so much. My Dad was a KB drinker, in longnecks and later in those gold cans. Back in the…

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