Ancient Web: Martin Mihál Scanned 39,050 Chocolate Wrappers

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Some museums preserve paintings behind glass. Martin Mihál's museum preserves what people usually tear open, crumple up, and throw away before eating the contents.

Visit the Chocolate Wrappers Museum.

The page describes the collection in wonderfully precise terms. As of January 2021, its webmaster said he had scanned about 39,050 chocolate wrappers from his own collection. The footer credits Martin Mihál and carries a copyright range beginning in 1999. That is the site's own dating, not proof that the current layout appeared unchanged in that year.

Visitors can browse by country, from Albania and Algeria through dozens of European, Asian, African, and American locations. The menu is a geographical catalog of packaging styles, brands, typography, and local tastes. It is possible to spend a long time comparing the visual identity of wrappers from a few neighboring countries without ever encountering a familiar global chocolate company.

The wrapper gets a historical caption

The main museum directory explains that individual gallery pages usually show no more than thirty wrappers and often include short histories of companies and the packaging itself. Every image is presented as a scan of a real object rather than a newly designed illustration.

Mihál also remembers older versions of his site. The front page says the current interface was intended to make browsing easier than its predecessor, a small admission that large hand-maintained collections eventually outgrow their first navigation systems.

The physical source of the images is important. These are not simply pictures gathered from retail catalogs. The collector is digitizing labels from objects he owns, preserving printing variations and brands that may otherwise have disappeared as companies changed packaging or closed.

A collection of scans is not automatically a complete history of chocolate. The site does not prove every wrapper's date of manufacture, and the breadth of represented countries depends on the collector's access and interests. Those limits do not lessen the value of the evidence that has survived.

This is a particularly convincing example of the specialist Web's habit of elevating an apparently trivial object into an enormous reference collection.

Browse the country catalog and gallery index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.