Strike anywhere

Paula Mejía on matchbooks as memories.

In 2015, a single matchbook quietly traded hands deep in Orange County, California. That innocuous transaction—$6,000 for the matchbook of a 1927 dinner commemorating Charles Lindbergh—broke the Guinness World Record for the most expensive matchbook ever sold. 

Matchbooks are unique in the collecting space because, unlike baseball cards and sneakers, memory tends to carry more weight than monetary value here (even if Lindbergh was involved). They aren’t worth much, financially speaking, regardless of whether they function as surviving ephemera of historical events and places no longer in existence. An unstruck Studio 54 matchbook sold on eBay for $149.99. 

Even one of matchbook collecting’s own legendary tomes—200 matchbooks purchased by the Mendelson Opera Company in 1889, embellished with hand-printed stories and photos of the opera’s cast at the time—saw one of its survivors insured for $25,000. That sum can be interpreted as either staggering or a steal depending on who you ask, given that “there are no set values on any of this material,” says Michael Prero, who runs the collector’s site Matchpro. That’s also given way to a culture of swapping matchbooks, in person and by mail to strangers, with little fear of being scammed. 

Subscribe to Weekly Dirt to read the rest.