Of course, we all know that back in the Good Old Days, everybody was Oppressed, Exploited and Disenfranchised. Life was unfulfilling, miserable, nasty, brutish and short. Children were forced to work in factories for a nickel a week, instead of being free to stare at their Smart Phones all day and roam around looking for trouble to get into. Strangely, it was precisely during these Dark Ages that even routine packaging items had class and a level of workmanship that is mostly limited to only the most expensive of small craft operations now. A lot of my Grandpa's tools were stored in repurposed cheese boxes, which were made of thin but solid wood, with elegant tongue-and-groove joints. The cheese we got at the store was encased in either wax or plastic, or wrapped in paper by the guy who cut the chunks off the big wheels.

(To be fair, a notable exception is the packaging of Apple stuff. Steve Jobs insisted that the packaging be as classy as the product inside. It wasn't until I read his Biography that I realized why I had so much trouble throwing away the boxes that Apple products came in, keeping them around, despite their limited utility for storage of anything but the item that had originally come in them.)

Longer ago than I want to remember, it was very hard to find ammo or components for the obsolete firearms I was getting interested in, although the stores were loaded down with supplies for the latest and greatest offerings from the manufacturers. I remember being delighted at finding 3/4 of a boxful of however-many-times fired miscellaneous .25-20 Single Shot cases, simply by driving to El Paso and back from Benson, AZ. All in a day's work for the diligent and constant scrounger.

I can't remember which foray netted these two boxes, but I'd just found an Ideal #47 rifle in .32-40, and was delighted to find them. Other loose shells came my way later on, and I never had to do more than deprime, resize and store these away for a rainy day, but the time is apparently coming, as the Supply Side rain has turned into a Somerset Maugham Monsoon Season as far as exotic components go. This is how components used to come, in nice, divided telescoping pasteboard boxes. Someone had repurposed a Remington .45-70 box, and saved a .32-40 box, using them to store a stash of Winchester Repeating Arms fired shells. They'd even penciled in some loading data on the inside of the smaller box lid. It's hard to read, but it appears he had a Pope rifle, from the writing. Here they are, for the record:

Attachment 298279. Attachment 298280

I wonder why, in these days of being able to form plastic composites in any configuration, and color, emboss, and print anything on them, that somebody doesn't reproduce boxes like this in plastic, complete with permanent printed labels in the plastic. There are a couple outfits reproducing the Winchester labels on cardboard boxes, but they are no more suited to rough handling or long-term use and storage than the examples above. Some of that thin, thermoformed stuff that we tear off our salami slices and lithium batteries and throw away, could be colored khaki and embossed with labels like this, and be a joy forever to the ten or twenty-person market of olde-tyme gun fanatics like me, that would be willing to buy them.

In our dreams, we are free indeed...