The following text was submitted and published in Collect It Magazine (Warner Group) in November 2005

THE BOOK
Although I had harboured the desire to produce a firework related book for many years the final impetuous came from observing last year's Guy Fawkes Night. Firstly I noticed that there were very few small sellers of fireworks left, newsagents etc, which meant that there were virtually no firework posters to be seen in the High Street windows. I found that to be rather regrettable, as these missing posters once helped mark out a particular time in the yearly cycle of the High Street. Over the past three decades we have seen the final fading away of our home-based manufacture of fireworks in favour of imported goods and now we appear to be witnessing the shutting down of the local, small scale supply of fireworks in favour of supermarkets and DIY stores and even through the internet.

And yet it was very plain to see how the evening of November the Fifth was just as popular as before; just as noisy, colourful and just as unreservedly fun. Millions of people continue to purchase fireworks, or watch them from parks and back gardens. They continue to take part in this strangest of night-time celebrations, so far removed today from its original Pagan roots and the later events of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. People no longer celebrate a festival of fire, or the overturning of a plot to destroy the King. They do not celebrate with fireworks, they celebrate the enjoyment of fireworks. It is one of the few chances in the year to have fun and to take pleasure in a simple act of participating in a nationwide burst of noise, sparks and colour. For one night of the year, millions of people can be found outdoors, in the dark, in groups and amongst strangers. For a few hours on November the Fifth, a large number of people are NOT watching television! This is all due to the instinctive draw and the temptation of fireworks and it hardly matters whether you are watching a small box of cheap garden fireworks, or watching a large public display in the local park. It amounts to the same.

Fireworks are the most universal of all forms of entertainment. The flight and burst of a rocket is perceived the same through eyes of all nationalities, all religions and languages. People across the world can and do appreciate fireworks for what they are, spectacular, exciting and instinctively fascinating. This is why fireworks are chosen to celebrate the really big events and festivals. People will remember the fireworks of Millennium night for a long time and global events such as the Olympics would be seriously lacking if fireworks did not add the climactic full-stop to their closing ceremony.

So there are still a great number of people who happily buy fireworks each year in Britain but what is missing from today's retail fireworks, and what makes them so different from those featured within the book, is the spirit, energy and flair of their label design. Gone are the beautifully crafted labels, which once adorned even the tiniest of fireworks. Some of the older bangers for instance boasted intricate and clever artwork, which could be almost impossible to appreciate due to the size and narrowness of the tube. But that minor technicality did not stop someone from designing the artwork, nor did it stop the manufacturer from printing and using the artwork.

Added to this is the interesting and little known fact of how few of the designs were created by professional designers, most coming instead from amongst the factory staff, or people associated with a contracted printing firm. Simple, highly appealing designs sat side by side with complex geometric patterns and detailed representations of scenes and objects. Some of the resulting labels are still easily recognised today by a surprising number of people. Traffic Lights, produced by Standard Fireworks, is probably the best example of this engraining effect of a simple and elegant design into the memory of many.

As soon as I began thinking about all the old labels, the ones I fondly remembered from the early 1970's, I realised that no-one had ever assembled a collection of them in book form. Would it work? Could it be done? Would there be enough surviving material around to enable me to make a book rather than a booklet? It would, it could and there was. That meant there was no excuse, I had to make the book and have it ready for the 400th anniversary in November 2005. I must admit to still being very surprised that no one had thought of this project earlier. It seems now so obvious.

When I started out on the relatively short production of the book (I began in January of this year) I contacted the two remaining old names, Pain's and Standard to view their remaining archive materials and used the internet to discover further sources of firework information and artwork. A British publication called Fireworks Magazine proved particularly useful and thanks to it I met many of the country's major collectors of firework memorabilia. I find it amazing, considering the ephemeral and disposable nature of fireworks, how so much material has survived through the years, including flat labels, posters, catalogues, display boards, price lists and incredibly even some of the original fireworks.

I visited several of the collections and used using high-resolution digital imagery to record the artworks. Upon deciding which of the 800 plus images collected would be short-listed for inclusion in the book, the long process of carrying out image repairs began. During April and May, I spent more than 300 hours digitally repairing all the tears, creases, holes, scratches, glue marks and burns which so many of the delicate labels and posters suffered from.

Within the book can be found examples of artwork from most of the major firms, with dates ranging from 1902 to the late 1980's when British firework manufacture effectively blinked out. There are some extremely rare examples within the book including 6 Mickey Mouse Brand firework labels, created in the early 1930's by Wells' Fireworks with the permission of Walt Disney himself. These beautifully detailed, pristine and flat labels, created by the Wells' company secretary, Fred Holman, may very well be the only such examples in existence.

During the final assembly of the book I decided to place all the images against coloured backgrounds, instead of plain white. The colours chosen for the backgrounds are reminiscent of 1950's utility kitchen furniture, being soft cyan, green and cream. This retro colour scheme added emphasis to the images and a gave the entire book a balanced feel to help control the riot of colour from within the pages. I believe that the final result is both visually stunning and a lasting testament to the great names of our once thriving firework industry.

It is hoped that as well as preserving and recognising this previously overlooked but popular form of art the book will possibly open the door to other collectors and people who are in possession of artefacts but until now did no know that there was a keen market and interest in them.

Another hope would be to be able to place names next to the designs; to discover before it is too late who the artists were and thus credit them with graphics that gave so much pleasure, for so many people for such a long time. That would be the real icing on the cake of Firework Art.

Biog details
My interest in fireworks began very early, at the age of five, when for the first time I sat and watched the neighbourhood fireworks from an upstairs window with my dinner on my lap. Wonderful. I could even stay up late! With our own family box and a trip to the local park to watch the council display, Bonfire night became the most exciting and magical night of the year for me, better even than Christmas. The weeks preceding the big night would be spent imagining, drawing and above all else, looking at the fireworks in my local shops. This is the true source of inspiration for the book, for the thing I loved most about fireworks were the labels-the colours, wild designs, fabulous names and even the exciting and imagination stirring warnings and instructions. The local shop display meant much more to me than the final destructive act of lighting the fireworks and those retail cabinets and counters are more clearly remembered now than the details of what each firework did in the back garden. To look into the glass cabinets and see all those wonderfully coloured labels was to enter an entirely new world-the firework-makers world.
As a youngster I wanted to make, design and then fire firework displays. A decade and a half later I was doing just that. For a number of years I organised and fired a good many private firework displays and also helped fire some very large public displays, including the Alexandra Palace Bonfire Night display, as a member of Pain's Fireworks display team. Pyrotechnics also played a part in my full time work as a designer of models and visual effects for film and television. This book, on the artwork of fireworks, is but the latest aspect of my lifelong fascination for fireworks, but it will hopefully not be the last.