MATCHBOOKS, A TINY DESIGN CANVAS

I miss matchbooks. Since the appearance of the cheapo butane lighter and the slow death of smoking, matches have disappeared as an advertising medium. Granted, they have become incredibly expensive things to have made and just give away, but they represent a cornerstone of American culture, maybe the dark side of our culture. I don’t think I’ve ever read a hard-boiled detective novel or spy thriller or even a horror story that didn’t have somebody using a matchbook in some way during the story. And, if you are of a certain age, how many times did you collect a phone number on a matchbook? Be honest. Think of all the marriages, all the children spawned because of matches. Makes one shudder to think.

Matches were also one of the sources of illustration work that commercial artists counted on for decades. One of the many things I collect are old matchbook catalogs. These were used by both neighborhood print shops and traveling salesmen in order books for matches printed all over the country. I think I’ve got around a dozen of them, different companies and different decades.

They’re full of the most amazing advertising clip art and examples of the most wonderful hand-lettered cornball advertising taglines in American history. The companies tended to steal each other’s designs, often redrawn by another artist, but sometimes not. Collecting different company catalogs reveals different takes on the same thing, over and over.

The match companies also updated the artwork they kept as stock images to be applied to your matchbook ad. You will see the exact same images suddenly change fashion or hairstyles about once every decade. Out-of-style taglines would suddenly make way for new corny taglines. Discontinued car models would be replaced with something more recent (it’s fun to watch tailfins suddenly emerge on packs of matches). These old logs were like a visual history of acceptable mainstream style throughout the 20th century. Another interesting aspect of this type of design is the way our morals and prurient interests clash and change throughout the decades. A great example is the nudie image. Naked ladies have been a fixture on matchbooks since the beginning of the last century. As each decade went by, you would see hemlines extend and recede, garters and nylons appear and disappear, lingerie go in and out of fashion. It’s almost funny, if it weren’t so telling about the repression of women in our culture.

The actual nudie images of naked ladies sitting in martini glasses or dancing in the spotlight drifted on and off matchbooks depending on the mores of each era. In the 1920s it was flappers and strippers. The 1930s emphasized hard times and covered it all up. The 1940s had naked ladies for the soldiers, so they know what they were fighting for. In the 1950s featured both nudies (considered dirty) and non-nudies (with gauzy coverings over the “naughty parts”). The 1960s was anything goes. You can watch the careers of guys like Petty and Vargas wax and wane, over and over.

Then there are the unfortunate racial and assorted “ethnic” images that slowly fade away from view over time. The “Darkey” material disappears around World War II—very abruptly, too. However, the hillbilly humor and Chinese stereotyping (perpetuated by embarrassing images used by Asian restaurants to this day) took much longer to fade. Derogatory Hispanic images used by Mexican eateries still persist on matchbook clip art even now.

The thing I miss most about the loss of the matchbook in our popular culture is, frankly, all the wonderful printing configurations that emerged from this industry.

It was such a competitive business for such a big, but narrow, market, the companies had to constantly offer new gimmicks and books to keep the customer from switching manufacturers.

The result was printing in every color of the rainbow on every imaginable service of the matchbook in just about any size matchbook with just about any sort of material. You name it, it was done. Collecting matchbooks (I have boxes and boxes of them—I hope they don’t spontaneously combust!) and looking through them is like reading a history of the lithography over the last century. It is a truly rich dialogue.