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 I asked around I was told that in the cold northern countries oranges were sold, years ago, individually wrapped in tissue paper. Often the wrappers were printed with designs created by the farmers or the marketers of the oranges, and these designs usually promoted the regions where those particular fruit were grown. Apparently the idea of wrapping was to help stop mould spreading from one fruit to another in the days before refrigerated transport and fungicides. They are very much a thing of the past, but I am not very surprised to learn that orange wrappers are a collectible. England’s Victoria and Albert Museum has a collection of them, and so does France’s International Museum of Modest Art, which has tens of thousands of examples.

If you know anything about me you won’t be surprised to know that I bought the albums and put them with my other collections of eye-catching ephemera.

It seems that most of Sweden’s oranges in the late 1920s (that’s when most of these date from) came from Spain, Cyprus, Italy and Palestine. Here, for your possible amusement and pleasure, is a selection of examples.

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Putting a label on it: ephemera from all over