Weakening Flame Decline Of Matchbook Industry Leaves Collectors Burning Over Their Hobby’s Future
It’s certainly not the first fallout that might flicker to mind.
But amid the war on cigarettes - with ever-more-rigid smoking restrictions, dire warnings about secondhand smoke, and protests over Joe Camel’s influence on children - an accessory, though largely innocent bystander, quietly contemplates its fate:
The matchbook.
Oh yes, those little souvenirs of a moment, marking a special occasion, a fond memory, a long-lost dining hideaway, find themselves quietly replaced on hostess stands by generous bowls of peppermints or toothpicks, if anything at all.
America’s pursuit of health is endangering the business of making souvenir matchbooks, and the hobby of collecting them, says Mike Godwin, national sales manager for Atlas Match Corp., headquartered in Euless, Texas.
He says the industry has been feeling the burn for at least a decade. American matchmakers produce about 2.5 billion covers a year, far fewer than a decade ago. The industry has downsized considerably, leaving only about three major U.S. companies producing the minimemory books.
“No-smoking campaigns continue to have effects,” says Godwin. “And California is a very volatile area. So is Austin, Texas.
“We find it just crops up sporadically across the U.S.”
Consequently the match industry over the years has attempted to keep up with changing times.
In this health-conscious age, some restaurants are quietly replacing matchbooks with “scratchbooks,” Godwin says. These feature the same artwork as souvenir matchbooks, but instead of including matches each contains about 20 sheets of paper - “just about the size to write a phone number.”
Other souvenirs between the covers range from mints and toothpicks to condoms. But that, Godwin admits, “really hasn’t taken off.”
Who’s most upset by this sign of changing times? Well it isn’t smokers.
They, Godwin says, are often more twinned with lighters.
It is, of course, the collectors.
But these aren’t collectors of the brandy snifter, fishbowl or junk drawer variety. … These are aficionados who are well into the millions - of specimens, that is.
With 44 clubs throughout the world, two trade shows (one in California, and one national convention hosted annually by the Rathkamp Matchcover Society out of Newark, N.J.) and about 10,000 hobbyists, matchbook collecting, some insiders worry, is moving into the big-league realm of stamps and baseball cards.
For Ed Brassard, a member of the American Match Cover Association from Del Mar, Calif., it all started as a ruse, shielding a habit that … well … became a different habit.
When Brassard was 15 and flirting with smoking, his mother found some matchbooks scattered on top of his bureau and demanded an explanation. He thought fast and told her they were … a collection.
“She shined off the smoking,” Brassard, now 31, recalls, “and then brought some more home from work.”
Sixteen years and more than 2 million matchbooks later, Brassard has long kicked the smoking habit.
The matches? Another story.
He started combing hotels, zoos, restaurants and national park gift shops to build his world-record-worthy collection.
“I have a hobby room - matchbook albums - and I put them in organized cheese boxes.”
Traveling coast to coast, from mortuaries to brothels, Brassard specializes in national parks and books emblazoned with images of bears. The oldest, an 1892 advertisement for J.H. Styles Leaf Tobacco, he obtained 10 years ago for $27 and recently sold for $100.
But matchbook - or match cover - collectors, if you will (since many remove the matches from the book), prefer not to put a price on their goods. Far removed from the high-stakes world of baseball card collecting, Brassard says, there is instead an emphasis on simply trading or just giving away some hard-to-locate cover to someone who has a hole in his or her collection.
But this isn’t to say that there isn’t money in the passion.
A 1927 match cover celebrating Charles Lindbergh’s flight went for $4,000, Brassard says.
Matchbooks celebrating any flight are more and more difficult to come by. With domestic airline flights gone non-smoking, Brassard has observed, the only place in airports where matches can be found are in some of the frequent-flier clubs. He has it down to a science, he says:
After sneaking in, “I empty the fishbowl and bring them back to our club members to share.”
Grab-table trading sessions at meetings or collectors’ conventions play an important part in keeping the mood friendly, says Santa Ana, Calif., resident Bob Hiller, who has been collecting matchbooks for about 25 years with his wife, Emily.
Both are members of Associated Match Cover Clubs of California.
Hiller, who serves as auctioneer for the regional and national conventions, says that although collectors look at the pursuit as mainly a social hobby, the prices “can get up there.”
Within the past five years, he says, values have climbed steadily. He attributes that less to the smoking bans and more as an indication of “just the times … the newer people in the hobby - like sports people who are looking into the clubs with a lot of interest.”