David Elliott: An Aladdin’s cave of tobacco packaging

For a non-smoker, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about cigarettes recently – or rather their packaging. Just before Christmas I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece on the merits of using Santa Claus to flog smokes after business secretary Peter Mandelson stepped in to delay proposals for plain packaging for all tobacco products sold in the UK.

Then, this week, the government moved a step closer to the ban by saying it would “consider carefully” the case for plain packs. Understandably, it’s clearly an emotive and divisive issue – as illustrated by the ongoing debates here and here.

Despite all of this, however, I obviously haven’t been thinking about cigarette packaging nearly as much as Igor Sergeev, whose website stakes his claim to being the owner of the world’s largest collection of unopened cigarette packs.

And, after amassing 35,888 packs since he began hoarding in 1976, if Sergeev’s isn’t the biggest collection on the planet, we’d like to hear what is. It’s immense, and the website is startlingly comprehensive – I spent an afternoon dipping in and out of it and only managed to scratch the surface.

You can search by country or alphabetically, and, as far as I could work out, every entry is accompanied by a photo – I challenge you to spend less than a few hours browsing through.

There are so many interesting, funny, unexpected and beautifully designed packs to view that I couldn’t possibly talk about them all here, but below are a few of my favourites, including the curiously named Daily Mails, which I imagine are a bit like normal cigarettes but with a slightly more unsavoury aftertaste.

View the entire collection here.

David Elliott is production editor of Packaging News

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