Matchbook Cover Art

Matchbook covers capture a wonderful slice of commercial culture from the 20th Century, when the heyday of cigarette smoking made them ubiquitous. Their covers were used to advertise everything from dancing girls to anthracite coal.

Like so much of our vernacular culture, these bits of commercial art were executed by anonymous creators whose primary discipline was not expression or creativity but making a specific business point in an extremely constrained environment.

The images that went on matchbooks needed to be high impact, yet not take much more room than one square inch. Indeed, these tiny art works may represent the richest modern flowering of miniaturist visual imagination until the advent of Gameboys and other tiny entertainment devices.

The art came from multiple sources – clip art books, custom images for motels and, sometimes, restaurants, commercial illustrators, branded products, etc.

But altogether, it is art.

Architectural Miniatures

Tiny Design

Little Grills

Motel Matches