Cigarettes and History

Some time ago I found a real treasure at a country fete. It's a hardback book, a popular (and selective, it has to be said) social history of South Africa, published in 1938. The unusual thing about it is that the pictures have all been collected from cigarette packs, the book presumably becoming more colourful as the owner's lungs became more congested.

Here's the title page - sorry for the distortion:

As you can see if you click on it to enlarge, it was "Issued by the United Tobacco Cos. (South) Limited, manufacturers of 'C to C' cigarettes - with which the pictures are packed". Smoking may be bad for your lungs, but in 1938 it was pretty good for your education.

This is a page from inside:

I'm wondering if the fact that some of the pictures have been pasted in a little crookedly means a child was doing the collecting, egging his or her poor father on to a nicotine consumption of several packets a day in order to complete the set - which, incidentally, he or she did, with a few extras to spare. Here are a few "doubles" which we found tucked inside the front cover:

And this is what they look like on the back:

In times where instant gratification is the norm, it's nice to imagine someone slowly building up this collection and perhaps swapping doubles at school to fill in the blanks. Over how many months I wonder? Imagine the satisfaction of pasting in that very last card. You don't get that downloading from Wikipedia.

Whoever this collector was, whatever political and social climate gave birth to the idea, and whatever meandering path this carefully nurtured book followed on its journey to the little town in country Victoria where I found it, I feel quite privileged to be its custodian now.