What I collect


I am only collecting USED cigarette packages, so I do not need mint cig packs.
In my opinion, these mint cig packs never have seen any cigarette or the country, which is noticed on it. So my way of collecting is similar to people, who are collecting stamps on envelopes. Even if the stamps have really been used to send a letter, they get a "history". As a proof for this, there is a postmark on it.

Because of this, I am very interested in the tax seals at cig packs. Sometimes I have cig packs, which are totally the same, but looking at their tax seals, you can see, that - for example – for some years within the state of Bosnia and Hercegovina there have existed four different tax seals: one for the Federation of Bosnian and Croats, one for the Srpska Republica (which was in Cyrillic letters for the Serbs), one for the Croats in the Hercegovina (called Herceg-Bosna) and at least green tax-seals for the so called "Brcko District", which is a small territory, existing since the year 2000.

Other differences I collect are:

  • different selling country
  • information about the producer
  • new informations and symbols like phone numbers, green point …
  • warnings (but I collect for example one version of the actual 16 possible version within the EU)
  • different bar codes
  • different amount of cigarettes
  • different information at tax seals like different importers (as mentioned in Hungary in the 1980´s or today in Bosnia and Hercegowina)
  • I do not count as new:

  • small differences of design
  • new selling prices
  • different versions of one type of health warnings