Smokin' Pulp
As an ex-smoker, I never thought twice about cigarette packaging — it was just something you tossed in the bin once you'd lit your last smoke. Looking back at how many packs (and cigarettes) I've thrown away over the years, I feel a bit guilty about the waste, and what it did to the environment and my health. What I didn't realise at the time was how much skill went into that packaging. Before graphic design simplified everything in the 1970s and '80s, real care went into creating alluring packs for every taste — from exotic Turkish-themed designs to a gentleman's distinguished tab, to a sailor's trusted companion at sea. The artwork did the selling: choosing a brand said something about who you were. The road to this first collection started with my love of pulp magazines. The Pulps laid the blueprint for the comics, films, TV, and books I've always loved — their artists shaped the compositions and colours still used in book covers, comics, film posters, and advertising today, while their writers built the narrative structures behind entire genres. Researching pulp history, I found something the artists all had in common: almost nobody appreciated them at the time. Many were embarrassed to admit they worked for pulp publishers, looked down on by the art and literary establishment. Publishers had so little regard for the original art that entire warehouses of paintings were destroyed by fire, given away at conventions, or thrown in dumpsters. Only a small fraction of it survives today. Artists like Virgil Finlay, Margaret Brundage, Norman Saunders, Rafael DeSoto, and Ed Cartier — along with a long list of contemporary illustrators — became my inspiration, and led me straight into a love of ephemera. From there, I started looking at other overlooked mediums: the in-house illustrators and print makers at design houses and publishers who churned out work for things we throw away without a second thought, rarely credited and probably never expecting to be.
