Cultural assets from the supermarket
Collectors of banana labels are few and far between / special editions are very popular
MAINZ. Some people dip into puddles after rare bottle tops. The others are searching in the love letters of their daughters for valuable stamps. Michael Siebenhorn is poaching preferably in the fruit departments of larger supermarkets. There he pull up - if the sales clerk doesn't look towards - the small coloured labels from the bananas.
Up to 550 pieces had the resident of the German city Mainz acquired over one year; all carefully sticked in a stamp album. But not all of them he got directly from bananas. A few months before - by boredom - Siebenhorn entered the term "banana label" into an internet search-engine. That far he thought he was alone with his faible for coloured stickers. But then he chance on a small virtual community of bananas label collectors. "It was really curious to see, that there are people who are seriously interested in this thing", Siebenhorn tells.
Everything began with a banana at his place of work. On the grey monitor cabinet of his computer the process engineer stuck his first banana label. And as the cabinet was full of labels, the first "banana label album" was required. At present, Siebenhorn has trading partners in Czech, England, Hungary, Finland and in the United States.
In Germany there will be only five active collectors, Siebenhorn tells. One of them he calls "our Guru", because he has the largest collection in Germany with more than 2000 labels. Unchallenged on the top ist a North American collector with nearly 4000 pieces - a professor of transport and communications.
But the most passionate collectors are not always the best trading partners, says Siebenhorn. First and foremost he is looking for people who stuck labels rather casually on the kitchen door or the refrigerator. And this perhaps already for decades. "There are slumbering the really true cultural treasures", the 31 years old Siebenhorn says. An acquaintance recently found a rare label in an old exercise book of his now adult daughter.
Very popular amongst collectors are - similar like with stamps - special editions: If in the United States a new Walt Disney movie starts, there will be often issued a small banana label edition with the cartoon characters displayed on it. Another edition came from Dole on the occasion of the Olympic Winter Games 1980 in Lake Placid. The mascot of the games - a racoon - is portrayed as a skier, a biathletic or a skater.
"Buying the labels via the internet is a bad manner", Siebenhorn says. About prices and the value of his collection he does not want to speak. If banana labels will be available for sale, most collectors will be give up. Michael Riehl from Frankfurt thinks so, too. From the fifth schoolclass - and thus for 25 years - Riehl has gathered together banana labels. 13 stamp albums are filled with stickers. He has more than 1700 labels - too many for the 10 megabytes of storage capacity, which provides the German Telekom for his homepage.
His most valuable piece is an 25 years old pale-yellow label of the Santa Marta company. "I am the only one of the well-known collectors, who have that.", Riehl proudly states. The most curious labels are those from "Kellog's". It is not that the cornflakes producer has changed over to bananas. "Some companies in the United States let their bananas as an advertising place such as Kellog's", Riehl says. At another label of his collection the customer will be reminded, that he also need to buy milk: "Got Milk?".
On some pages of his album Riehl has complete sections of nearly identical labels. Again and again the classic Chiquita symbol: A woman with a fruit basket on her head, yellow on blue ground. But aesthetics are not the point for the "true collector", Riehl says. "It's more the rarity and the completeness". More than 100 different labels are only from Chiquita - over the years the symbol changes for several times. But most the small differences are the point. So there are small letters on the labels, which are telling the curriculum vitae of the banana. The first one stands for the harbour, from which the banana was shipped - from A for Panama to Z for Guadaloupe. The second stands by Chiquitas for the place where the banana was packed, so if there is any complaint the reason could be found.
Sometimes collectors detect new distinctive features. This features will be spread by circular letters. Recently one noticed that the "Madeira sticker" exists with and without the "R" for the copyright. In addition they are differing in the shade of blue. "A noteworthy discovery", Riehl considers. For the non-collector the internet have another surprise: A virtual banana label museum at www.b-a-m.de.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday Newspaper from February 18th, 2001