The Bookseller magazine runs an annual competition to find the oddest book title. This year marks the 30th anniversary of this event, and the all-time crown deservedly went to the splendidly titled book Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (you can, apparently, identify the postman who 'cancelled' the stamp on a Greek letter from the postmark). Each to his own, I suppose. Last year's winning title was the equally wonderful How Green Were the Nazis?
I'm not sure we in the packaging industry can quite compete, but the captured knowledge represented by these arcane and esoteric titles is a rare commodity and once lost, is almost impossible to recover. We often rely on the internet to search for information, but electronic data can be a fickle thing.
One of our members, who works for PZ Cussons in Manchester, has been given the task of sorting out a storeroom, prior to moving into a new factory. This contains a wealth of historical information and samples from the company's early days in Kersal Vale back in the 1920s.
Much of this will go to local museums and to the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in London, which features over 12,000 original items from the Robert Opie Collection. This is a wonderful insight into the history of our industry, and it is fascinating to see how much, on one hand, things have changed over the decades as new technology and materials have become available. On the other hand, the central mission of the industry, to protect and promote products, remains intact. The website at www.museumofbrands.com has more details of what can be seen if you visit the museum in Notting Hill.
Later this year, the IOP will be moving into its new building in Grantham, which will house an excellent library facility. We have a world-class Minerals & Mining library, which is subject-indexed and holds journals, articles, maps and reports from across the world, some dating back to the 16th century. We aim to have a similar facility for packaging books, magazines and articles. The library will include current textbooks and information, and we already have a good number of 'historical texts', including Packaging Review magazines from the 1940s to 1980s that provide a valuable insight into packaging practice and process over the decades.
We are sure that many companies will have books, catalogues, training and technical manuals, in addition to audiovisual material of all types, that is gathering dust in a storeroom or filling up shelves. Companies come and go, and individuals retire or move on. We need to capture that valuable knowledge, so please, please, go through the old storerooms and cupboards and let us have these hidden gems.
If we lose the information and the knowledge, it would be a real tragedy. Just contact me on ian.morris@iom3.org.
Learning about packaging
