Welcome. This is what my wife calls "a bunch of stupid jokes and pictures of paper bags." She's right about the jokes. She's wrong about the bags: some of them are plastic.

What the critics say: "Utterly unnotable" (Wikipedia editor). "Ridiculous collections #4" (Buzzfeed). Other comments: "As complete wastes of time go, it's a very high quality complete waste of time... An entirely dispensable source of inane comments about a truly trivial subject... A monument to the planet's worst corporate design... An unwelcome reminder of some of the more unpleasant moments in our lives."

Donations (unused, please) of bags not represented in the bag gallery are welcomed -- please mail to this address, and I'll credit you on this site! I am happy to trade any extras that I have. Check out the links to other bag sites, find out how you can use your spare bags, and explore the fascinating world of bag manufacturers. 

Highlights: The design features page reveals the secrets of professional baggery, and the logos page analyses the enigma of airline corporate identities. Search for your favourite bag, browse the bag gallery by country and airline, and check out the biggest, best and worst bags!

Bagsite of the month, November 2007

Monoglot anglophone visitors (that's you plebs wot speak only English) may be disappointed by their visit to this month's Bagsite of the Month, Wolfgang Franken's airsicknessbags.de. Just three links on the homepage: "Collectors", "Information Deutsch", and "Information English". Is that all? the first-time visitor asks. Just one page of English text, no bagshots, not even a listing of Wolfgang's collection? Look again. Click on the "Information Deutsch" link, and you'll be rewarded with a much fuller set of information on bags and baggery (try dumping it into Google's translation service to get the gist). Plus a fascinating set of bag pictures in the links on the left side: batches of bags categorized by theme (birds, animals, flowers...), along with a couple of newspaper stories on baggery. Wolfgang is exceptionally modest about his own sizable collection. You have to dig to find it: try clicking on Collectors, then scrolling down the substantial list of baggists until you find his name. There's still no pictures of the individual bags, but there's a list of items in his collection, plus a list of his swaps, with links to scans in the definitive Baghecht internet collection. Criticisms? Well, the link to the baggist mailing list still goes to a now-defunct mailing list, rather than its successor, the vibrant barfbags egroup. And it would be nice to see some pictures of Wolfgang's own collection. Still, Wolfgang's site, one of the oldest in bagdom, is still worth a detour, and perhaps even a return visit, on your travels through bagland.

Monday, November 12, 2007 

Underbagged

What do Latvia, Liberia and Lesotho have in common? Yes, they all start with an L. What else? They're all missing from my barfbag collection.

What's the biggest country not represented? Chad. In terms of population? Burkina Faso. Other prominent absentees (coloured red in the map): Georgia and Rwanda. 

Major underrepresented portions of the globe are a swathe of Africa and chunks of Central Asia and Central America.

Donations from these areas especially welcome!

Centres of megabagdiversity are the USA (though many US bags are distressingly plain), China, the UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil and Indonesia. 

Click here for details.

For new baggists only

New to the world of bag collecting? Want to get a head start on your collection? Then send me an email, and I'll send you a randomly selected free starter pack from my surplus bag stock. There won't be anything rare, and you may end up with some duplicates, but at least you'll be able to show your friends a few more of these lovely cultural artefacts. Make sure you include your mailing address in your email. Offer good as long as stocks last.

This is where old news goes when it's too old to be news.

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