The product of an eight billion dollar home-grown industry, breakfast cereal is as American as jazz, muscle cars, or Hollywood movies. Yet unlike those pillars of American pop, cereal box collecting hasn't gotten the respect it deserves. The reason for this terrible oversight may be summed up in one word - cardboard. Whereas millions of packrats saved Louis Armstrong records, Casablanca lobby posters, and shiny '59 Corvettes, who, for crying out loud, saved old cereal boxes? Most souls see an empty cereal box and think trash. Mothers sacrificed stashes of Disneyland light ups or Twinkles cereal boxes that escaped curb-side pick up to the hungry gods of spring cleaning. Up in smoke or buried in landfills are all the Trix, Stax, and Apple Jacks cereal boxes we hollowed out each morning a bowlful at a time.
Or so it might seem to the uninitiated. In happy fact, vintage cereal boxes - made of the same durable stuff as baseball cards-are all over the place, once you learn where to look. Old stores, attics, pantry top shelves, warehouses, antique malls, and collectible shows are begging to share their crunchucopia with the savvy cereal hound. More and more sports collectors realize that cereal boxes are really big sports cards. Why settle for an itsy-bitsy Willie Mays card when you can have a great big Willie Mays Corn Flakes cereal box? Once you take the plunge from the safety of your uncluttered world into the almighty cereal bowl, you'll be amazed at how fast your paperboard pets will colonize every corner of your hideaway.
In 1988, the cereal collecting bug climbed up my leg and sank its teeth into my left thigh. Overnight a delirium spread across my mind until I saw clear-asday that the lurid, eye-popping graphics plastered across cereal boxes were the greatest art the world has ever seen. Leonardo, Van Gogh, Picasso, and other great artists were egg-sucking amateurs next to the quirky creators of Marky Maypo, Tony the Tiger, Trix Rabbit, and that grain god par excellanceSonny the Cuckoo Bird... Wuuuaaak! I'm Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs... Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs!
To bring my flaky vision to the multitude, I got the crazy notion to map the entire breakfast table, decade by decade, from its humble turn-of-the-century beginnings to the present in a series of picture books. The project was insanely ambitious. A total innocent on the subject, I had no idea how deep and wide the bowl was I was wading into. My only model at the time was the Lunch Box collecting world, which turned out to be a stagnant frog pond next to cereal's vast Great Lakes. As find after find after find piled up in my basement, back hall, office, and shower stall, I began to feel like I was standing under Niagara Falls with my mouth open! Seven long.. and gulping.. years later, the cereal collectables ezine you gaze upon now brings the first installment of that sugary vision into reality.
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