A book of matches could, in fact, serve multiple purposes at once: provide a light to a smoker a blank space for a note or an errant phone number and a memory of a place you loved wholly.
Bean & Sons Co., the last remaining matchbook manufacturer in the United States. Traute, an enterprising sales representative, collaborated with Pabst Blue Ribbon to promote the Wisconsin beer on a matchbook, setting the stage for a restaurant merger.Īn easy advertising vehicle for nearly all of the 20th century, matchbooks are adaptable “because they’re inexpensive, the lead time on them is pretty quick, and you can do so much with the printing on the match cover itself,” says Julia Bartlett, Vice President of Operations for the 83-year-old company D.D.
Their inventor, British chemist John Walker, originally marketed them as “Lucifers.” A patent attorney named Joshua Pusey later created the more common cardboard matches in 1892, and his patent was subsequently sold to the Diamond Match Company. Matchbooks were no different, say, than forks or knives (though indisputably more tactile and fun). Way back then, the matchbook was part token, part function it was intertwined in the necessary hospitality of the space. In 2002, when I got my first job waiting tables, you could still smoke in restaurants, after all. Matchbooks, when I began collecting them, were commonplace in restaurants. One thing I do pine for, though - especially now - is my old matchbook collection, which I amassed over a long career as a server, sommelier, and diner in restaurants. In the throes of that fervor, I tossed away a lot of ephemera that I have mostly forgotten about, and don’t much miss. But before I did that, I hired an organizer, to help me reduce the contents of my world.
Matchbook collectors near me series#
In Portugal, Jose Manuel Pereira published a series of albums to catalog and display matchbox collections called "Phillalbum".Back in another version of my life, I moved to a glossy two-bedroom in Park Slope, after eight years spent in a beat-up, one-bedroom in Astoria. In Japan, Teiichi Yoshizawa was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's top phillumenist. Widespread introduction of bulky (for collectors) cardboard matchboxes with less distinct images on them, much poorer quality of print and, also some social phenomena, made this hobby (like many others, not connected with commerce) much less engaged. The hobby became especially widespread from the 1960s through the 1980s.
After World War II a lot of match factories worked in close contact with local phillumenists, issuing special non-advertising sets. Quite often people who went abroad brought back matchboxes as souvenirs from other countries. In some collections it is possible to find labels from chemical matches, produced from 1810 to 1815-long before the modern matches arrived. Polish matches from the Częstochowa match factoryĬollecting of matchbox labels emerged together with matches.
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