Collector's album - collect, swap, glue
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Collecting albums are notebooks that are sold empty and are intended to be filled with collectible pictures. The target group is usually children or young people.
The collectibles (for example, stickers, cards or trading cards) are either sold or are product additions to merchandise such as candy bars or chewing gum.
The idea of using pictures to promote merchandise in Germany goes back to Franz Stollwerck (1815-1876), who produced "picture chocolate" or "photography chocolate" as early as 1840. In the Paris department store "Au bon marché," where Stollwerck spent his journeyman years, picture additions were common practice. Stollwerck pictures have been coveted collector's items ever since their creation.
The first Liebig pictures appeared around 1875 as supplements to the product packages of Liebig's meat extract. Supported by special collecting albums, systematic collecting of the pictures began around 1890.
In 1913, the Kaffee Hag company published a series of 3000 collectible pictures of German coat of arms for the first time; the collectible pictures were enclosed with the coffee packages.
Collectible pictures reached their peak in the period between 1900 and 1910, when cheaper printing techniques led to mass distribution. Coffee, confectionery and other products were advertised with trading cards.
The associated albums underwent a change from the previously common insert albums to glued-in albums. In addition, the albums were now usually dedicated to a particular theme, such as , movies, actors and actresses, fashion, nature, coats of arms, flags and uniforms, technology and transport, the Great War, etc.
After the largely collapsed production of trading cards in World War 2, more and more companies offered trading albums and trading cards from 1950.
In 1979, the Panini publishing house pushed more and more into the market and brought out its first Bundesliga album. From 1984 onwards, almost all other publishers of collectible pictures were pushed out of the market. Panini's product range includes stickers for the German Soccer League, World Cup or European Championships, as well as movies, superhero comics and Disney.
As an elementary school child, I myself also had collector's albums of Heidi and the Disney movie "Bernard and Bianca - the Mouse Police". There were also Duplo and Hanuta albums on various themes in the 1980s; I had one with animals. It was also important here that you could swap duplicate pictures among each other, so that you didn't have to use your pocket money just for collectible pictures.
