The Paper Bag Archive
Tim Sumner has been collecting paper bags for some time now, and as more and more people find out about the collection, more and more have been offering him bags. With the collection approaching 2,000, he’s starting to say no to quite a few. “It makes me sound likeI’m really picky, but sometimes it’s just space. You know, I don’t have a massive warehouse to put them in. It’s just a bit of racking and some boxes.”
Is it important that they’re bags? “I suppose it is important in a sense, but I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. It’s the history of it and the aesthetics.” There’s also the fact that they’d normally get thrown away. “They’re sort of designed for that day. They’re supposed to just be gone… you’re a nutter if you keep them. I kind of just love the fact that people collect all sorts of things now.” Part of the thinking behind the archive is just to share things that’d otherwise end up forgotten. He tells me “It’s good to collect,” but “it’s a shame for them to rot under someone’s stairs.”
I learn from Tim that the word ephemera comes from Ancient Greek for lasting only a day – making the bags, in some way, “the ultimate ephemera”. He notes that for how long they’re meant to last, a lot of effort used to go into them. Talking about places that still hand out paper bags, it seems the approach is to “make your own stamp, buy a load of bags and stamp it on… rather than doing a four-colour screen print or something.” As a collection, some things jump out that might have got lost over time. He says it “sort of tracks social history, things like coronations. You can see how the flavours of design have changed, and illustration.”
After our call, he emails me a picture of a recent find – a plain Selfridges bag, with ‘Selfridges’ written in Cooper Black. It’s part of an upcoming zine on department store bags. I’ve tried to look for that iteration of their logo online but turned up nothing. It’s lost on the internet, but it’s in this archive.
