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The History Of The Paper Label

By: Mark Bartley Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Imagine a world without labels. If every tin can in your kitchen cupboard didn't have a label, it would certainly make mealtimes a lot more interesting and somewhat random, but there's yet to be a recipe created that'll make tinned peaches and meatballs in gravy taste good so thank goodness every tin is clearly labelled. The paper label is an essential part of 21st Century life and despite its tendency to go unnoticed and unloved, paper labels chart the history of modern society and still (unless you happen to like meatballs with tinned peaches) has a place today.

Paper labels have been used to identify products since the early 1880s and spawned its own artistic profession – the art of the lithographer, the first truly commercial art form.

The driving principle was simple: catch the customer's eye. Make your product stand out amongst the rows of other products. A simple gum was used to stick the paper labels to the surface of products and shopping suddenly became much easier and much more colourful. As time went on, some designs of paper labels reached iconic status, incorporated into modern art (Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup tin) or as a collective memory of an entire generation (Heinz Baked Beans). There's even a whole collector's field dedicated to paper labels and some of the rarest can command incredible prices.

The next big breakthrough came in the early 1930s when entrepreneur R. Stanton Avery manufactured the world's first self-adhesive labels. This label came with a paper surface and a coat of adhesive and a liner, which had a special silicone coating. The term pressure sensitive became the industry name for this type of technique of label production and pressure sensitive labels are and integral part of our lives today.

For the next 50 years, the world of labels didn't alter drastically – there was a straight choice between old-fashioned gummed labels and the pressure sensitive labels created by Avery. The next big step forward came in the computer boom of the 1980s, when inkjet printers really became available to the masses. As the price of inkjet printers began to fall, people realised that the quality of printing was far superior to the old dot matrix printers. The added advantage of being able to feed standard A4 size paper through an inkjet also made the innovation of label sheets possible, and the public began to print their own labels (professional lithographers were not pleased by this development). The ability to print your own envelope labels, labels for your home made jam or pickled onions and a wealth of other applications encouraged the software manufacturers to include label templates in their office packages.

In the background, the advent of the laser printer (developed in 1969 by Gary Starkweather at Xerox) brought about the next generation of high quality printers. Although the first laser printer cost a cool $3,600, once again prices started to come down and by the 1990s laser printers were replacing inkjets as the printer of choice.

As printers developed, so did the labels to feed them and now everyone has the ability to print their own paper labels. If you're about to send out a big mailshot for your business, being able to transfer a database of names and addresses en masse into your template program and just hit print saves you time and money. With every size, colour and even shape available through office suppliers, paper labels have shown that even the simplest of ideas can develop and grow according to the external pressures of the marketplace. The paper label still has an important role to play both in business and at home, and a pack of labels is always a handy piece of stationary to have around.

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About The Author: Just one of the modern office items that need to considered and purchased, print labels come in hundreds of different varieties. Making a decision on which to use may be helped by this review by Mark Bartley.