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Zig zag papers5/21/2023 They commissioned bizarre FM commercials, exotic packaging, Frisbee and hang-gliding promotional campaigns. The paper-chasers took their street smarts to Europe, and came up with wider papers for pot smokers tired of sticking two papers together. Their rejection in America turned out to be a disguised blessing: paper designed for use with tobacco burns all too rapidly for less mainstream needs. They learned that “rice paper” was only a fond memory and that rolling paper was usually made of wood pulp, which was cheap, or flax fiber, which burned better. In Europe, the paper-chasers learned about bursting, tensile and tear strengths, paper porosity, carbonate and pulp contents. manufacturers like Kimberly-Clark and Olin-Illinois, who frowned on producing small orders for a bunch of seeming hippies, they scored with more willing manufacturers in Europe. Weed pipes were popular. But there was a gap in the market for papers:Īs the Age of Aquarius bloomed, the paper-chasers saw a market for specially made rolling papers. It’s got papers, it’s got bongs/ It’s got chillums, it’s got masks/ It’s got pipes of acrylic, and wood and glass and brass/ It’s got spoons, stashes and snorters, and testing kits for coke/ What ain’t it got? It ain’t got dope! This time around, though, the words are a little different: Its 52-page, four-color catalog is shimmeringly modern but, looking at it, something suggests the song “There Is Nothing like a Dame,” from the Fifties show South Pacific. The salespeople from the 50-strong staff that works for 28-year-old Don Levin are all young, but the smiling visage of beret-wearing Jean Bardou, the “Man from Job” (played by Jake Levin, Don’s father) who invented the rolling-paper-booklet machine in 1835, provides an air of maturity as it peers down from posters and packaging.Īdam’s Apple’s $10 million volume makes it the biggest pure paraphernalia business in an industry that grosses anywhere from $150 million to $250 million a year by selling, among other things, more than 160 million booklets of rolling paper annually. The booths are decorated in the bright blues, reds and yellows of the Societé Job, the giant French manufacturer of cigarette filters whose rolling papers are exclusively distributed in the U.S. On the third floor, just a few aisles from the escalators, the Adam’s Apple Distributing Company of Chicago has spent $5,000 to camp in booths 3210, 32. In 1977, Rolling Stonewrote from the 13th National Fashion and Boutique Show: These papers are from Steve Elliott’s collection of 1970s rolling papers. The tokers wanted paper that was longer and wider. It was based on the logo of the Zig-Zag cigarette rolling-paper company and it brought on an attack of nerves when, terrified that any passing policeman would assume the worst from an illustration showing somone apparently smoking a joint, the two artists “took what little pot we had and flushed it down the toilet”. They had their first big hit with a 1966 poster advertising a concert with Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Kelley and Stanley Mouse scoured the public libraries of San Francisco for inspiration. Kelly and Stanley Mouse’s 1967 poster inspired by Zig-Zag rolling papers They were smoking paper that had lead and cadmium and God only knows what in that ink, which would have been running all over their hands.”īy the time the custom of smoking made its way to Alcoy, Kesselman says, the papermakers there recognized the need for a special paper made just for smoking tobacco, so they produced a clean-burning, white, rolling paper, which they advertised by promoting its hygienic properties. “It wouldn’t have been like they were smoking a new New York Times. “There was probably green smoke and sparks coming off of them,” Kesselman says of these early rolling papers. When they were done smoking these enormous stogies, they would toss the butts on the ground, where peasants would pick them up, take them apart, and reroll what was left in small scraps of newspaper. The aristocrats smoked Tommy Chong-size cigars, rolled in palm and tobacco leaves. Ben Marks supplies a potted history of the rolling paper (via Boing Boing):Īfter tobacco was introduced to Spain from the New World in the 1500s, a tobacco trade developed in Europe in the 1600s.
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