Quick and dirty

Shelf Appeal has been all about the paper recently. So when I found this small tin whilst putting away Christmas decorations, I thought I would get a bit dimensional.

I used to collect packaging. But watching my brothers house slowly turn itself into the second coming of Robert Opie sort of put me off. But I couldn’t quite seem to part with this little number. That picture on the lid is nothing if not a fashion illustration, complete with berets and a plaid skirt. Very similar to the little vignettes dotted across the pages of Vogue, or the tasty illustrative Jaeger advertising of the 1930s. Which probably explains why it is a lone (ish) packaging survivor on my shelf.

I found the thing in a box of tat at some Manchester flea market, I think. Years later, studying for an MPhil and getting very good use out of a staff pass for the National Art Library in the V&A (the best thing by far about that studying) I found a reference to it in a packaging magazine of 1938. I wasn’t looking for it but that is when you turn up things.

I really miss those V&A stacks. As far as the greedy design historian eye could see there were journals and books on designy things. I am pretty sure I got through every British Vogue up to about 1950. Art & Industry. Display. Architectural Review. Commercial Art. Graphis annuals galore. And only some little part of all that browsing was relevant to what I was actually supposed to be researching.

It seems they made a bigger Quickies tin, too. All the better for displaying on a shelf. All the better for seeing the nice illustration and sweet rope-like typeface used for the name. Not that I’d want two Quickie tins, you understand..