![]() It also eliminates the need to sit at home and wait for friends to come by to ask, “What’s the deal with the fishbowl?” ![]() Taking a quick photo is an instantaneous way to gather and share visual souvenirs. Every aspect of our lives has been condensed into the smartphone in our pocket-flashlight, camera, mailbox-and now the phone has hijacked our innate habit of collecting. Various circumstances led to their demise, from the rise of the cheap butane lighter to the decline of smoking. Matchbooks no longer hold the allure they once did. (He also collected sugar cubes and soaps from hotels he was “what is usually referred to as an eccentric,” noted an Allentown paper). When he died in 1968, his family inherited rooms and rooms of matchbooks, more than five million covers, stashed in cheese crates and wood cabinets with custom-sized drawers. The Sir Edmund Hillary of matchbook collecting was a doctor named Charles J. At the peak of matchbook production in the mid-1970s, some 35 billion matchbooks were manufactured-the square-foot equivalent of approximately 3.5 million billboards. And the real estate that matchbooks occupied was immense. Like bar napkins, they also proved useful for jotting notes on the inside some bars intentionally left spaces on the covers for the purpose of recording the name and number of potential future dates. Motel owners left them in guest rooms, bar owners put them in ashtrays, restaurants stacked them like cordwood near cash registers. A common saying was that every matchbook contained 20 salesmen-each time a match was taken out, an impression was made. Owners could then emblazon their logo front and back and give them away. Instead of selling the matchbooks to consumers for pennies, they could sell them in bulk to business owners for dollars. Early matches were sold to customers one book at a time, but enterprising folks quickly realized that this matchbook acreage was going unsowed by marketing sharecroppers. The matchbook would then be tossed on the bar, drawing the attention of companions.īowman thus also invented one of the most effective and omnipresent advertising platforms ever devised. ![]() The tapping of a cigarette pack, the miniature sulfurous fireworks, the long, portentous inhalation followed by a cumulous cloud roiling toward the ceiling. Bowman is inadvertently responsible for one of the most common phrases ever printed: “Close cover before striking.”Ī matchbook removed from a pocket invariably served as a prelude to a minor ceremonial moment. A nibbling rat could thus ignite a match (who knew?), which could lead to unfortunate conflagrations. ( Diamond Match ultimately acquired both patents.) Bowman later invented a “safe” match, meant to be folded up in the matchbook and to deter hungry rats, because matches were then coated with paraffin (“of which they are quite fond,” read the patent). Shortly thereafter, Charles Bowman is credited with inventing the matchbook as we know it today. The matchbook’s lineage dates to 1892, when Joshua Pusey of Pennsylvania came up with the idea of producing two rows of flexible cardboard matches attached to a paper folder and sold with a striking strip dangerously positioned within the matchbook (his variation was apparently designed to be stylishly carried in one’s pocket). “They fulfill the desire for something free and for something beautiful.” “Matches fulfill two American needs,” Larry Steiner of the Universal Match Co. “A whole room of the Pater home,” reported the Journal News in 1976, “is devoted to the collection which Pater keeps in binders and in frames on the walls.” (Pater specialized in matches from county seats and had at least one matchbook from each of the nation’s county seats, some 3,000, save two.) Clem Pater of Hamilton, Ohio, amassed more than 600,000 matchbooks. Serious collectors would pry out the staples along the bottom, discard the flammable parts, then put the flattened covers in albums or display racks. Acquaintances would stop by to ask about her new matches. “It’s a great conversation piece,” she said. In 1971 a newspaper profiled Margaret Randall of Ogden, Utah, who kept 2,000 matchbooks in a large fishbowl in her living room. You brought them home and threw them in a drawer to be perused at leisure and paraded before friends. Travel souvenirs have taken many forms-the first items brought home to memorialize a trip were apparently bone fragments of saints-but let’s take a moment to consider a once-widespread travel keepsake: the matchbook.įor much of the 20th century, when you stopped at a lounge, bar, restaurant or motel, you slipped a book of matches in your pocket. Before Instagram, there were postcards, refrigerator magnets and snow globes.
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