Free With This Issue

For some while I have toyed with the idea of creating a set of faux cigarette or tea cards, to be collected and stuck into an album that I would create using Blurb or some other POD service.  For many of us, those covetable card miniatures were our first introduction to the pleasures of visual art, not to mention the completist joys and frustrations of collecting.  They were also a last flourishing of a childhood free of the visual bullying of film and TV tie-in strategies and disneyfied branding. Like most such ideas, however, the concept of making a set of cards is more fun than the execution.  After all, it's not as if I could give away a free card tucked inside the wrapper of every blog post.

My children's generation collected stickers; not trade giveaways but sealed packs bought from a box kept safely out of the reach of shoplifters behind every corner-shop counter, usually football teams or those inescapable film and TV tie-ins.  But I was quite impressed by the innovative design of certain sticker albums where the sticker filled a gap in a whole-page illustration, rather than sitting in a conventional "album" frame.  So you might regard the picture above as a draft page from the collection Great British Roadkill, with three stickers in place.  Why not collect all fifty?

Incidentally, I noticed that the previous post was post number 1111.  That must mean I have racked up something like half a million words over the seven year life of this blog, which is the equivalent of about five novels. Admittedly four of those novels were unpublishable prentice-work, and the fifth is still going the rounds collecting rejection slips.  Apart from the fact, that is, that I haven't written any of them. Hmm...