Orange wrappers and other papers

It's blood-orange season, and they come from Morocco or Italy, sometimes gloriously wrapped up -

Most orange wrappers you see nowadays - if at all - are less exciting -
I started noticing, and collecting, orange wrappers in the early 1990s, after unexpectedly seeing an exhibition of Francesco Clemente's work at the Royal Academy (see and read about more recent watercolours here). It intrigued me and I bought Three Worlds; in Ettore Sottsass's essay, there is wonderful mention of paper, of the culture of paper - craftsmen in mills making special kinds of paper:

"all-cotton handmade paper, as they say, heavy, dry, granular paper that absorbs just the right amount of water, paper that lets watercolour spread and makes it transparent, or opaque; soft paper that can be picked up and laid on the table as if it were a religious instrument"

and

"that daily way of using paper, of holding it, throwing it away, burning it, pasting it, cutting it, honoring it, and despising it ... the culture that circulates in the senseless hours of days and nights, the culture of paper to be found in alleys and in trattorias, in train stations, at the grocer's and the butcher's, at the dairy and in the pastry shop, at the post office and maybe also in the ministries; certainly in army barracks and in the official gazette, but also in porno photofiction. ... In all these wide popular uses, paper, being expensive stuff, has to cost less and less, and so for popular uses the paper gets thinner and thinner and more transparent, grayer and yellower, more violet-colored, dirtier and coarser."

In Italy, until a few years ago [the essay/book was published in 1990] "packages were made with light, crumbly paper that was always too short, and Romanengo in Genoa, who used to sell the best chocolates in the world, made his packets with a blue, shiny paper, whereas butchers used yellow paper with dirty, very vulgar black spots on it, and sugar was put in gray-blue paper bags that were always falling apart, and fruit, lettuce, or tomatoes were sold in old newspaper. Almost all packets were made of newspaper; even your shoes mended by the cobbler, even books, even bread, was taken home wrapped in old newspaper; whereas for oranges there was a very thin paper printed with the growers' trademarks, which were always figures of heroes from a long popular dream: lions, tigers, Garibaldi, Aida, Othello, the occasional special dragon, gigantic snakes sometimes even printed in gold."

The essay goes on to talk about what happens to all these bits of paper when they get thrown away; I went on to amass orange papers, keep them safe (and to eat dozens of oranges a week) - in the back of a cupboard are about 500 different designs. I photographed a few when I first started blogging (five years ago!) - they haven't been out of the cupboard since.

Some orange wrappers from the 20s and 30s (found on the internet, source lost)