the safe cigarette: Menthol Daze

The booklet is 107mm X 150mm. The inside page once opened is 297mm x 420mm (A3)
The cover is printed on white card, the inside page is black and white on 130g cartridge paper. There is space for 14 collectors' cards. Each edition has 9 cards pasted in. The collectors' cards are printed in colour on glossy paper. Menthol Daze was produced in a limited edition of 7.

Menthol Daze is a fold-out page containing spaces for collected cigarette cards. The booklet is produced under my own invented brand Elysian's Cigarettes. The images are manipulated collages from Salem cigarette advertisements and images from the Sierra Clubesque publications from the 'fifties celebrating the great outdoors. The cards are numbered and when pasted into the booklet, text accompanies each picture. The images are intended to represent the clichéd images of delightful countryside, so often used in selling products - by attempting to make them appear natural.
The text that accompanies each image however details reasons to be uncertain of the countryside. Threats in the natural environment range from nuclear testing contamination, dangerous infections carried in rivers and annual lawn mower injuries, to the link between temperature change and heart attacks.

The intention of Menthol Daze was to juxtapose 'threat' and 'relaxation' found in the Great Outdoors in order to lampoon the inflated claims made for nature in advertisements - cereals, shampoo, cars, sweets and snacks, insurance and mobile phones.

Image of folded-out sheet, with all colour cards added