“Everything looks pretty interesting but it might take me a while to figure out which ones I have or don’t have, already.” “OK, let’s see what we have here,” Bouchard says, spreading his new gifts, which include matchbooks touting such long-gone, local haunts as Underground Pizza Works, Moskovitz & Moskowitz, Garden Creperie and the K-Tel Motor Inn, out on a table in the basement. When we caught up with Bouchard a few days later, he was only too happy to take those hundreds of matchbooks off that reader’s wife’s hands.ĭenis Bouchard owns tens of thousands of matchbooks, which are stored in photo albums, three-ring binders and drawers. Adolphe and the lone Manitoban in the group. Within a few hours Pasternak put us in touch with Denis Bouchard, a lifelong resident of St. ![]() That all changed after we dug around a bit and turned up Morris Pasternak, president of the Ontario-based Trans-Canada Matchcover Club, the country’s foremost matchbook collecting organization. ![]() Yes, we did put together a story about a phillumenist, or matchbook collector, in July 2007, a person whose sole focus was matchbook covers boasting logos of Winnipeg bars and restaurants from yesteryear.īut no, we were forced to reply, we no longer had that person’s contact information, nor were we familiar with anybody else who collects matchbooks, a brand of advertising that was ubiquitous in the first half of the 20th century, then steadily declined, largely due to anti-smoking campaigns combined with the 1973 invention of the BIC lighter. Do you know someone who would like these?”įirst of all, our contact has a long memory. I seem to recall you doing a story on someone who collects old matchbooks and it turns out (spouse’s name removed) has a few hundred she would like to give away. When you’ve been writing about collectors and their various treasures for 17-odd years, your inbox can get rather… interesting at times.Ĭase in point: a few weeks back we received an email from a Free Press subscriber whose wife was torn over what to do with a mishmash of nostalgic objects she’d kept stored in the garage for years, mostly because she didn’t have the heart to toss them out with the trash. This article was published (921 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. ![]()
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