Ante Rodin

Ante Rodin was born on 19th January 1930 in Prvić Luka near Šibenik to the Rodin family of farmers and fishermen, father Milan and mother Marija. He received his primary and secondary education in Šibenik.

During his studies at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Technology in Zagreb, he was president of the University Student Union Committee for Technical Education and a member of the Main Committee of the Croatian Technical Union and many other federal student associations for technical culture. During the course of his student practice in Finland in 1956, he became fascinated by the amount of packaging used in Western countries. This was his first and perhaps fateful encounter with packaging, which would intensify in 1959.

He then accepted a position at the Packaging Bureau of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce. 
At this time, expensive and impractical wooden packaging was being replaced with corrugated cardboard. In 1961, Ante Rodin published his first work: Guidelines for the Application of Corrugated Cardboard in Packaging. In 1964, this small and unappealing booklet grew into his first book entitled Corrugated Cardboard Packaging. His book Packaging in Industry was published in 1968. He was also the editor of three journals: The ABC Tehnika, Suvremena tehnika and DELTA, the forerunner of the popular SAM. 

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When the book was published, he found employment in Italy and returned to Croatia when the demand for the domestic manufacture of packaging products increased. At the time, i.e. in 1971, Engineer Rodin developed his passion for collecting. During redecoration of his flat, which was paid for with the money he earned in Italy, he came across the first item of his future collection of packaging – a camomile tea box from the pharmacy ‘K crnom orlu’ (the Black Eagle) in Kamenita Street. This marked the beginning of his passionate collecting work. Initially, he only collected old packaging, but soon, realising that packaging plays a crucial role in preserving, selling, and using products, while also reflecting advancements in civilization, he started collecting all packaging, regardless of the time they were manufactured. He frequently looked for them in landfills and old attics, but also at antique fairs.

He earned his doctorate degree in 1984 with a thesis on Trends in the Development of Packaging and Packaging Technology for the Distribution of Agricultural Products at the End of this Century. By 1984, he had published three more books dealing with the role of packaging in marketing, distribution and sale of products. The first exhibition of old packaging from his Collection was held in 1983 at the Zagreb Museum of Arts and Crafts. Ten more exhibitions were to follow with the crowning event being an Exhibition called Glass Packaging before the Use of Plastics held in Düsseldorf in 1991. Dr Rodin retired the same year, at the beginning of the War of Independence in Croatia. 

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The shelling of Zagreb and the aggression against Croatia caused Dr Rodin to fear for his Collection. He moved the collection to a safer place – his family home in Donja Stubica. Owing to family and health reasons, as well as the need to protect his collection, Ante Rodin also moved to Donja Stubica.  

Until his death in 2005, Dr Rodin continued to complement his collection and worked tirelessly to present it. Rodin had been awarded numerous diplomas, awards and medals, and he was appointed the life-long president of ‘Zajednica ambalažera Hrvatske’ (the Croatian Association of Packaging Manufacturers and Users). Perhaps the best socio-scientific biography of Ante Rodin can be best concluded with his own observation on packaging: ‘I am not invited to evaluate the significance of my collection, for what is of value to you is not of value to me, what is suitable packaging for ‘šljivovica’ (plum brandy) is not suitable for wine – therefore there are no limits in perception of the importance of packaging. Since the beginning, man came in a wrapping in which he was born, and I am not a man of hobby. I see packaging as an interdisciplinary product combining different branches of science and technology for which, if you are to recognise it, you need to be an erudite in everything from art history to technology – packaging will continue to survive as long as there is human civilisation.’