French paper ad inserts make me forgive that they are inserts.

Can I be honest with you? I know that it's totally wrong of me, I am an art director after all. I love paper, great prints, the smell of markers in the morning and all that goes along with it. But, I'm afraid to admit this, I can't stand paper ad inserts.

Sure it started innocently, I used to rip ads out of the Joe average mags like Wired or Newsweek, just rip and go so that I could concentrate on reading the magazine that I had paid for. That was fine, I figured, I'm not missing anything important that way. But you know what the graphic design an art mags look like right? Every fifth page there is an ad insert about paper, with the paper advertised as the insert. This is stuff I should know about, but at some point it got so bad that I stopped buying my HOW's and CA annuals and Graphis and whatnots because I just couldn't read the articles I wanted to read as those paper inserts were annoying the hell out of me. I stopped looking at them, I stopped feeling the paper, I stopped paying any sort of attention to these inserts even though they were directed at me and contained information I'd find useful because they bugged me so much.

Let me introduce you to the exception to the rule.

I mean looks at these geezers, who wouldn't want to collect these characters? It's the French paper ad inserts in HOW magazine that stopped me mid-motion right as I was about to rip them out and actually entertained me (while sneakily showing off their lovely paper and great color reproduction)

So of course, I began collecting them!

They're small enough to fit in my scrap book and fancy enough for me to care. Good job, French paper! You got me!