Christopher Howse has narrated this article for you to listen to.
We’d been told it would be a ‘brat’ summer, characterised by its inventor, the singer Charli XCX, as ‘a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra’. It hasn’t worked out like that for me, so I was glad to discover a counter-culture valuing matches over throwaway lighters.
Young people, so the Wall Street Journal tells us, are collecting matchbooks and matchboxes and sharing their collecting habit on TikTok. I suppose it’s better than swapping pictures of their burgers.
Once things are collected (as anything can be), exclusive rules put half the world in the wrong. To the ‘phillumenists’ of the British Matchbox Label and Bookmatch Society (founded 1945) a great crime is ‘Neighbouring a skillet’. A skillet is the pre-printed rectangle of cardboard ready to be folded into a matchbox. A famous collector called Peter Neighbour thinned these by paring the back surface. Purists regard this as fatal damage.
To me there is little point collecting matchbooks run up now as bait for collectors by a bar where smoking is illegal. Matchboxes belong to the two centuries that required a flame to light tobacco, candles and fires. Just as cigarettes were decanted into cigarette cases, so in the 19th century vesta cases of silver or cheaper metal held non-safety matches made of wax-soaked cotton.
It was shocking to read in Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James’s whodunnit set in 1803 in the world of Pride and Prejudice, a reference to Darcy lighting candles with the ‘taper and matches’ to hand.
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