Vintage matchbook values5/6/2023 “It’s not a business card it’s a little piece of the house that they can have in a pinch,” Peterman says. But then a resurgence in the matchbook market occurred, due, Bartlett said, to the “vintage novelty” of matchbooks, and to the realization by restaurant owners that “people will take them home.” The matchbook, as it turns out, has a long shelf life it takes the restaurant with it when it goes. Smoking bans were enacted countrywide in the early 2000s, creating the initial effect of curbing match demand. The matchbook was blank and white on the inside so you could write down a number of a person that was flirting with you.” “Back then, smokers drank more and stayed later,” remembers Jen Peterman, a 30-year restaurant veteran and current server at New York’s Porter House Bar & Grill in the Time Warner Center. 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. 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.
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