I was a Rich Man's Plaything

A letter-paper-sized scrapbook of American ads and pulp covers, glued together in austerity Britain, with a printed "POP!" in it a decade before anyone called the movement that.

1. 1
   The pulp-romance pin-up

   The largest clipping, filling most of the sheet: a woman in red

   The biggest fragment is the cover of a pulp confessions magazine, Intimate Confessions, a woman in red ringed by its own sensational cover lines ("Daughter of Sin," "Woman of the Streets"). The title of the whole collage is lifted word for word off this cover, so even the name of the picture is a found object, not a phrase Paolozzi wrote.
2. 2
   The "POP!" pistol burst

   Over the pin-up: a man’s hand and pistol, firing a white cartoon burst

   A hand holding a pistol fires the word "POP!" in a white comic-strip burst. The "POP!" was not lettered by Paolozzi; it was cut intact from the packaging of a toy pop-gun, where it meant nothing more than the bang the toy makes. That printed 1947 "POP" is the famous detail, the word sitting inside a picture roughly a decade before "Pop art" was a phrase, and it is a coincidence: the movement was not named after this burst.
3. 3
   The Coca-Cola logo

   In a lower corner, a fragment of a soda advertisement

   A piece of a Coca-Cola advertisement is dropped in whole, the single most recognizable badge of American consumer culture, glued down without comment. To a Briton on ration books in 1947, a Coke logo read as a small bright emblem of a country with everything to spare.
4. 4
   The WWII bomber

   Lower left, an aircraft carrying a wartime slogan

   A wartime aircraft (usually identified as a Lockheed Hudson or Ventura type) flies across the lower left under the slogan "Keep ’em flying!" The war that had only just ended is still bleeding into the consumer imagery, the same printed stream selling both the bomber and the soda.
5. 5
   The cherry pie

   A cherry and a slice of pie, set among the rest

   A glossy cherry and a slice of cherry pie, the food-ad shorthand for American domestic plenty, sit jarringly close to the gun and the pin-up. Abundance, glamour and violence are all cut from the same magazines and pressed flat onto the same card.
6. 6
   The magazine-cutting texture

   Across the whole sheet, the visible edges where scraps meet

   Separate printed scraps, each with its own paper edge, typeface and color registration, are butted and overlapped on card. The seams are left showing on purpose. The picture is openly an assembly of mass-produced print, not a smooth illustration pretending to be one image.