c 1968: Nosmo King Smoked out

Jack Palmer (who I see will be 80 this year, and doesn’t look a day older than most Printers born in 1926) kindly passed over a set of his cartoons and drawings, mainly produced for SO Review from the 1960s onwards. One such cartoon seems particularly relevant at the moment, with the topic of the smoking ban in public houses on the nicotine-stained lips of every boozer in Britain (or is that just me?). Ignoring for the moment the implied sexism, which would no more have occurred to anyone in those days than the thought of an office-wide smoking ban, the Heath-Robinson device depicted may well have lodged in the mind of ‘young’ Joe Bishop, who some 20 years later — when the office-wide ban indeed took place — contrived a similar contraption out of map-tubes and parcel adhesive. At the time, Joe worked on the ‘Karen’ computerised print system. A small prize for anyone — including Joe — who ever understood what it was all about. Impressed the Management Group, though.

(Original cartoon from Jack Palmer)

[Back]