The Swedish match industry was one of the most innovative industries of its time. While the factories relied on trade secrets, patent registration and even copyright laws to protect their innovations, it was the trade mark system that transformed the Swedish match industry and made it a global powerhouse. This concluding chapter outlines how these trade marks became a valuable asset for Swedish match factories and ultimately for Swedish Match, and helped to shape its identity throughout history, as well as today.

Throughout history, matches have been offered up in packaging of every conceivable shape and size, with varying labels to match. This chapter explores how matchbox labels evolved over time and how they came to be registered as trade marks in Sweden. It includes a history of the development of trade mark law in Sweden, and the impact this had on the match industry.

This chapter examines how advertisers came to commercialise matchbox labels through matchbox merchandising. There was an obvious novelty factor associated with the matchbox, which set them apart from traditional print advertisements and made the messages attached to them more memorable. It was this novelty factor that transformed the matchbox from merely a utilitarian object to a collectable commercial memento used to promote third-party brands and businesses.

Thousands of matchbox labels were produced in Sweden during the nineteenth century and were registered as trade marks. But only some of these have stood the test of time. This chapter showcases the icons of Swedish matchbox label design, some of which remain in circulation. Labels featured in this chapter include the original Jönköping yellow matchbox label, the Three Stars brand, Svalens or the Swallow brand, and the famous Solstickan matchbox label.

This chapter explores how Swedish Match, a global leader in the match industry, leveraged trade marks to build its empire. While patents are commonly associated with innovation, this chapter highlights the significance of trade marks in driving innovation and influencing business success. Through a historical analysis of Swedish Match’s trade mark portfolio – the Swedish Match collection – the chapter outlines how this book challenges the notion that patents are the gold standard when it comes to innovation. In particular, the Swedish Match collection and this book exemplifies a branding strategy that broke new ground through brand innovation, utilising trade marks for advertising, establishing a collective brand and embracing trade marks as an instrument of influence.

Chapter 4 treats Norman Mailer’s sui generis Advertisements for Myself as a critical moment in the psychopath’s genealogy. Critics have long debated the text’s generic classification, treating it, on the one hand, as an anthology (an attempt to capitalize on the antecedent self of its author in order to resell his previous work) and, on the other, an autobiography (an attempt to capitalize on the fame of previous work to sell the self that produced it). Both classifications presuppose an antecedent, fixed subject, traditionally held to be the source of the literary text (a vexed issue for theorists of literary interpretation during the period). Reading beyond the problematic racial politics of “The White Negro,” the essay that Mailer placed at the center of the book and whose eponymous hipster hero he dubbed a “philosophical psychopath,” the chapter concentrates on Mailer’s attempt to cast the psychopath as an alternative to the fixed self – an icon of resistance to the massifying and conformist pressures in the domain of domestic labor during the Cold War. The form that resistance takes is the appropriation of the genre of the novel to fashion a protagonist whose biography is his creator’s previous work.

Chapter 5 continues the overview through a different analytical lens. It investigates the EU’s toolbox, describing and classifying the regulatory tools used by the EU legislature across the different lifestyles. It identifies four main types of interventions: ban and composition requirements, tax and price measures, rules on advertising and promotion and rules on mandatory and voluntary information. Beyond this systematic description and classification, the chapter serves three aims. First, it confronts the regulatory tools used with the stated objectives of EU lifestyle policy, assessing their adequacy and suggesting possible reforms. Second, it highlights the significant regulatory disparities existing between lifestyle risk factors, critically evaluating the justifications for such differential treatment. Third, it shows how health and internal market objectives are intertwined in EU lifestyle policy, generating legal frictions.

Tax advisors may have helped a meaningful percentage of taxpayers to dodge their taxes, but advertising was a far more powerful medium in mid-century America for signaling the rising respectability of tax dodging. Publicity and advertising provided exposure and exposure helped to demystify, destigmatize, and normalize tax dodging. Although stories about the high-profile tax dodging described in the previous section provided exposure too, advertising suggested that it was not something only available to the rich and famous. Advertising alone may not have changed attitudes toward tax dodging, but it mirrored and reinforced changes in social attitudes toward the practice.

The “information system” should provide understanding, which is needed for the practice of good citizenship. But it is not working well. This started with the rise of advertising in the late 19th century, when industrial output rose so dramatically that consumers had to be persuaded – on the basis of impulses and sentiments – to buy what they wanted rather than what they needed. When this sort of talk became obviously effective, public relations emerged to make businessmen, like Rockefeller, look good, and then, during World War I, propaganda was used to make the government look less warlike than the nasty “Huns.” Thus a powerful language of selling was introduced into American life, preferring efficacy rather than Enlightenment standards of truth, veracity, and reason. Scholarly explanations for how this all worked started with Marshall McCluhan who said that each “medium” – such as books or the telegraph – controls what kind of messages we can transmit. Then Neil Postman pointed out that the medium of commercial television will “amuse us to death” by ignoring our real needs in favor of peddling profitable wants. Thus Postman alerted us to how, since he wrote, getting our attention via slippery language has become the dominant business model for corporations today and has corrupted the marketplace for ideas.

This chapter explores small-scale industries during the colonial period. Rather than seeing these industries as a traditional holdover from earlier times, it regards them as a large, vital and dynamic element in the colonial economy. The chapter explores two particularly important industries in depth. Handloom manufacture undoubtedly declined as a portion of the overall economy during the nineteenth century, but by 1880 it had started to grow, forging new markets, introducing new technologies and undergoing shifts in social organization. The production of medicines expanded by adopting new forms of marketing, particularly newspaper advertising. A range of other small-scale industries also grew during the later colonial period. Associated with these developments were the rise of a diverse set of small-scale entrepreneurs, new products and marketing methods; the introduction of small, ‘everyday’ forms of technology; changes in workshop organization; and the construction of new ‘business communities’. But these industries were also characterized by low wages, social dependence and precarity of employment.

The Conclusion reflects back on the many weeping eyes considered in the course of the book, as well as the insights they provide concerning the tear’s complicated relationship with perception and knowledge, with affect and signification, with gender and power, and with science and sentimentality. It also examines an advertisement for spectacles that illustrates some of the ocular challenges the Victorian periodical press posed to reading eyes. This analysis brings the study back around to affective hermeneutics and to a discussion of the tear as critical lens, a figuration that encapsulates both the theme and method of the project.

‘Dickens Unwrapped’ focuses on part publication as a peculiar dynamic of the unbound book as an interim phase before and after the complete set is bound by the publisher. In the monthly parts of The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, two loose illustrations printed on different paper appear before the text. Additional sets by other illustrators publicized in the Pickwick and Nickleby Advertisers act as complementary additions that diversify and customize serial fiction as part of the publisher’s marketing strategy. In Master Humphrey’s Clock, the official illustrations are inserted as vignettes in the body of the page of letterpress, rather than as full-page illustrations. If this tighter control of the visual and verbal layout of the original marks out additional sets more clearly as extras, specimens of additional illustrations inserted in advertisers restore the book’s potential as an open-ended collection of illustrations and alternative ways of seeing and reading Dickens’s writing.

This chapter challenges the conventional wisdom of how users of social media platforms such as Instagram, X, or TikTok pay for service access. It argues that rather than merely exchanging data for services, users unknowingly barter their attention, emotions, and cognitive resources – mental goods that corporations exploit through technologically managed systems like targeted advertising and habit-forming design. The chapter explores how these transactions are facilitated not by legal contracts but by code, which allows social media companies to extract value in ways that traditional legal conceptual frameworks cannot capture. It further highlights the negative externalities of these exchanges, such as cognitive impairments and mental health issues, framing them as pollution byproducts of the attention economy. By examining both the visible and hidden dimensions of this technologically mediated exchange, the chapter calls for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that govern our interactions with digital platforms rather than rushing to propose new legal solutions.

This chapter examines key features of the language of print newspapers in Britain from the founding of the London Gazette in 1665 up until the present day. It describes significant milestones in the history of English newspapers, outlining major socio-historical, economic, cultural and technological developments which have had an impact on the emergence, diversification and professionalisation of this important mass medium. After an overview of the major subgenres found in these multi-text conglomerates – news, opinion and advertising – the focus is on news reports. The chapter outlines how the chronological mode of reporting news preferred in the first two hundred years of newspapers gave way to the inverted pyramid style of news narration, subsequently abandoned for more flexible models like the package approach in modern news discourse. Furthermore, this chapter provides insights into contemporary journalistic ideals and practices employed in positioning the paper and balancing information density and readership appeal.

Chapter 10 questions whether law should widen its lens to address general appearance discrimination too. Would a protected characteristic of appearance offer viable legal rights to the many millions of us who do not have a disfigurement but are less-than-beautiful in some way? For example, is appearance objective enough to be adjudicated in law? Is a clear distinction between mutable and immutable aspects of appearance important – or even possible given increasing medico-cosmetic opportunities to change the way our bodies look? Do we have an unobjectionable nomenclature to describe appearance and attractiveness in legal terms? And could we swallow well-meaning employers’ attempts to measure the attractiveness of their staff for the purposes of diversity monitoring? The discussion draws on examples of comparative laws in France and America. Both countries have adopted wider conceptions of appearance equality, and America’s laws have seen a recent period of growth, with Binghampton, New York, the latest to vote such a law onto its statute books in 2023. However, both sets of laws remain little used so far, despite evidence showing that appearance discrimination remains prevalent. How could we ensure that a protected characteristic of appearance in the UK avoided a similar fate?