Four Great Classics of Cigarette Cartoons

Author: Li Desheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: Cigarette cards are small advertisements attached to old cigarette packs. They have many names, such as "foreign paintings," "small films," "cigarette pack labels," "ornamental papers," and "figurine papers," varying by region. Due to their exquisite printing and rich content, they were deeply loved by people at the time. In the first half of the 20th century, they were wildly popular and were known as one of the world's three major collectibles alongside stamps and coins. This book compiles and selects works from cigarette cards that once depicted content related to China's "Four Great Classical Novels," enlarging and printing them for distribution. On one hand, it allows readers to see the artistic images of characters from the "Four Great Classical Novels" as created by advertising artists, which are entirely different from the "leaf characters" of the era, the illustrations of portraits in Ming and Qing dynasty printed books, and the figurative sculptures on folk woodblock New Year paintings from the Qing and Republican periods. On the other hand, this book enables readers to understand how early advertising designers organically integrated commercial activities with traditional Chinese culture.