The Victoria & Albert, one of the world’s great museums for all kinds of popular culture, published in 1985 Orange and Lemons: Fruit Wrappers from the Victoria & Albert Museum. It is hard to contemplate how many of these beautiful coarsely printed bits of ephemera have been produced. The ones in this book edited by Gill Saunders are but a small sampling of an appealing collection of hundreds still being produced. The New York Times wrote in 1995: “Some collectors maintain … that more than 300,000 designs have been printed. Four, and even five, colors are common. The wrapper is a sort of tissue paper, porous on one side to trap escaping juice. … One man has more than 24,000 wrappers and collects at a rate of 1,000 acquisitions a year.”
