Discover a New Subculture: Fruit Crate Label Collecting

Last week, the words 'fruit crate label' wouldn't have conjured up much as far as I was concerned. The label you put on a crate of fruit. End of.

Now I know better, thanks to a cache of them that has come across my desk. Add the magic words 'Vintage' and/or 'Original' and a huge world of collecting opens up. It turns out that old fruit crate labels, mainly American ones from the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, were often things of beauty; graphic art and indeed hand separated colour litho printing of the highest order. These labels were the 'window' to the produce inside the closed wooden crate, and had to be eye-catching and memorable. Some would have representations of the fruit inside, but many would concentrate on the brand name, which leads to my favourite label (above), for 'Trout Brand' Apples. Hats off to whoever in marketing came up with that one.

Books have been written about the history of these things (here's an excerpt from one of them) and there are many specialist dealers. There are evidently tens, if not hundreds of thousands of them still circulating as collectables, and while repros are available, it's still possible to come by originals, most of which are unused - they've never been stuck to the side of any crate. I wondered at first how this could be, but the answer's simple: the change to cardboard boxes, with logos and so on printed on them, left piles of unused labels sitting in warehouses. It was only a matter of time before they went walkies, or were sold off in bulk to people who thought there might be a market in selling to them to people who, well, just liked the way they looked. They tend to be about 12 in x 11 in, so big enough to look great on the wall, if you're into that kind of thing.

Here's just a tiny selection, starting with a few from the batch I acquired, but followed by others from around the web...

... and finally, this company presumably underwent some frantic re-branding in the late 1930s...

"Stop [pause] messin' about!"

When Harold Pinter wrote sketches for Kenneth Williams

Programmes for Pieces of Eight (1959) and One Over the Eight (1961)

A couple of theatre programmes this week. Both quite rare survivors. It's the name of one of the writers in the first one that caught my eye...

In May 1958, Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party opened in London. Eight performances later, it closed, after a critical and commercial battering. (True, influential Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson gave it a rave, but it had already come off by the time that review was published.) Pinter would eventually break through in 1960 with The Caretaker, but in 1959, when his Birthday Party producer Michael Codron put on a West End revue starring Kenneth Williams, the 29 year old writer was probably happy to be asked to contribute a few sketches.

The lead writer for Pieces of Eight was a wunderkind who was then still a student at Cambridge: a pre-Beyond the Fringe Peter Cook. His sketch 'Not an Asp' is probably the best-remembered bit of the show, and was still being performed by Kenneth Williams, and indeed Cook himself, decades later.

Pinter had four sketches in the show: 'Special Offer', 'Getting Acquainted', 'Request Stop' and 'The Last to Go'. Of these, 'The Last to Go' was the only one to make it onto the Original Cast Recording album, which is still available. It's a typically, um, Pinteresque piece of desultory conversation between an old newspaper seller (Williams) and a bartender, which manages, by not really being about anything, to be about pretty much everything. There's a later performance, without Williams (but possibly featuring Pinter?) which you can hear in full here. 

Though the other three sketches were published in the collection A Slight Ache and Other Plays, it appears Pinter chose not to preserve 'Getting Acquainted', and I've seen the piece described as 'possibly lost'. However, given that the revue's full script would have been submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office to gain a licence for performance (as all theatrical productions had to do back then), there must be a file copy somewhere, probably in the British Library. 'Umbrellas', a forgotten Pinter sketch for a later revue, turned up there last year, and caused quite a fuss.

Pieces of Eight was a big hit, and ran for over 400 performances. One Over the Eight followed in 1961, again written largely by Peter Cook (who was by then the toast of London), but without any input from Pinter (who was by then the toast of London too, albeit with a somewhat different crowd toasting him).

Here's Kenneth Williams, pictured in his dressing room before going on to perform in Pieces of Eight. I wonder if he ever got a visit from Harold.