Are matchboxes worth collecting?

Given that it’s a hobby rooted in nostalgia, there’s something ironic about the fact that TikTok – a short-video social-media platform better known for airing teenage angst – is driving the current fad for matchbox collecting. A new technology is sparking a craze for an outmoded one. 

It can safely be assumed that the respectable “matchbox-label collectors”, who met at the Boulogne Restaurant on Gerrard Street, London, on 17 September 1937, never imagined that they would one day be sharing their “swapping circle” with the fashionable young things of the 2020s.

But here we are. The young are embracing “phillumeny” – the hobby of collecting matchbooks, matchboxes and other match-related items – and “displaying their collections at home and online”, says Anna Grace Lee in The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a resurgence of an interest that harks back to a time when matches were ubiquitous as smoking and advertising tools.” Related searches on Etsy rose 92% in the three months to the beginning of August from a year earlier, a representative for the online marketplace for homemade and vintage items tells the paper. You can buy posters and prints celebrating the colourful little boxes, a phillumeny-themed “it-girl wallet” from New York fashion house Kate Spade (if it isn’t already sold out) and even order your own matchbooks to give out at parties.

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“To some, matches are associated with a certain restaurant-hopping lifestyle that is increasingly harder to achieve,” says Lee. For Britta Lokting in The New York Times Magazine, collecting matchbooks also became “a way to document what may one day disappear”. 

“With their slogans, doodles, aphorisms and inside jokes, matchbooks are objects of beauty that evoke an establishment’s singular character,” she says. “Looking at one can trigger the din of a specific night out or a snippet of conversation, even the hours spent alone.” When favoured watering holes close down, their matchbooks become treasured relics.

It certainly makes a change from the other fad of the last few months, the “brat summer”, characterised by British singer Charli XCX as “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”, says Christopher Howse in The Spectator. But can a passion for matchbooks survive in an era in which smoking in bars is illegal? “To me, there is little point collecting matchbooks… matchboxes belong to the two centuries that required a flame to light tobacco, candles and fires,” says Howse. 

I’m not sure those matchbox-label collectors would agree. In 1945, the organisation today known as the British Matchbox Label and Bookmatch Society was founded. On its website, three letters written in the 1980s and early 1990s reminiscing about the society’s early days can be found. In one, a founding member ends his missive by exhorting the young to pick up the baton and carry the society forward. They must be hoping this craze doesn’t fizzle out.

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