Before we get on to aspects of design, let’s just take a little time to think about what these wrappers actually contained. A generation of children raised on bubble gum, fizzy drinks and sweet cigarettes – in the days before sugar tax, when E numbers were a signifier of quality and sophistication. It’s a wonder any of us who lived through this era have any teeth left at all.

All these products were aimed at kids – but they gave a peculiar foretaste of the adult world we could expect to grow up into. It would seem the main thing we were expected to do as adults was smoke – the aforementioned sweet cigarettes, coconut tobacco (my personal favourite), liquorice pipes and grotesque chocolate cigars. Career options, meanwhile, were law enforcer, space explorer, racing driver, footballer or pop star. Failing that, you could always become a monster. No wonder we couldn’t wait to grow up.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dandy was a Danish gum producer, founded in 1915, that expanded hugely through the 50s and 60s. Photograph: Fuel publishing

If you’re of a certain age these wrappers will speak to you deeply of your desires as a child. The one that presses my buttons is the image of the mini racing-car construction kits. This product is unusual in that it didn’t even pretend to be a sweet – unlike most of the tattoos and trading cards featured in the book, which also contained a sliver of brittle, bright-pink gum that could draw blood if not chewed carefully. These kits were unapologetic tat. I vividly remember working out how to get money out of my ceramic piggybank by jamming a knife blade in the slot and then holding it upside down and shaking it. As soon as I had liberated enough coins I went to the corner shop and bought one of these. Then I ran home to construct it – which took about two minutes. So I jammed the knife into the slot again to get more cash and rushed off to the shop again to buy another one. This went on all day. I was like a nine-year-old crackhead. The world of addiction abruptly reared its ugly head in the suburbs of Sheffield.

Lucky bags also provoke an almost Pavlovian response in me: what’s lucky about a bag containing the sweepings from a novelty factory floor with a couple of sweets thrown in? But it was the mystery that had us hooked – what if something really, really precious was in there?

It never was, of course – no matter how many times we tried. So in that sense the wrappers featured in this book were the perfect preparation for life in a late-capitalist consumer society: the package promised so much but never delivered on that promise. They were simply designed to separate kids from their loose change as effectively as possible. They were like those mythical beads supposedly used to buy Manhattan Island from the Native Americans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charms Blow Pop. Photograph: Fuel publishing

This is by far the safest way to consume these products. To see them for what they really were. To focus on what was important about them all along: the designs that hooked in an entire generation, the pretty pictures that spoke to our primal desires. At this distance, preserved for all time upon these pages, they are beautiful.

Go on… feast your eyes.

• Wrappers Delight, compiled by Jonny Trunk with a foreword by Jarvis Cocker, is published by Fuel (£24.95). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15