- "Phillumeny" is the
collecting of matchboxes, matchbox labels, and matchcovers. The
oldest branch of the hobby is the collecting of the removable
labels from matchboxes. This started in the latter 1800's and
is still the main focus in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Later, matchboxes
appeared with the text printed directly on the box. Thus the
boxes, themselves, then became collectible.
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- In North
America, and to a lesser extent South America and Western Europe,
the focus of the hobby is heavily weighted toward matchcovers.
Invented by American Joshua Pusey in 1892, although that's somewhat
of a technicality. Charles Bowman invented a matchbook at the
same time that was much more similarto the matchbooks we're familiar
with today, but Pusey's patent was registered first. Diamond
Match Co. bought the rights to the Pusey's matchbook in 1894...and
the rest is history!
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- American
label collectors gradually switched their attention to matchbooks
instead of matchbox labels, so much so, in fact, that labels
are not popular with today's North AMerican collectors. By the
early 1930s, the first organized matchcover clubs began appearing,
although none of these were exclusively matchcover clubs,
and none of these survived. But, they eventually did give impetus
to the birth of RMS.
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- In 1941,
Henry Rathkamp and a handful of collectors founded what soon
came to be known as the Rathkamp Matchcover Society. Today, it
is the "parent" organization for phillumenists throughout
North America. Under the unofficial umbrella of RMS, there are
currently some 20 regional and specialty clubs around the US
and Canada.
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- There
are also clubs in England, Germany, Holland, France, Portugal,
Romania, Malta, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Australia, India,
and Hong Kong, but in almost all of these foreign clubs the collecting
centers on boxes and labels.
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- This
has always been a small hobby. Here in the US, it reached its
peak in 1987 when official hobby membership reached 4,000. Since
then, with all the anti-smoking campaigns and resulting restrictions,
the number of collectors has declined precipitously, paralleling
the decline of available new matchbooks. As of this writing,
the decline has apparently bottomed out, but collectors presently
number less than a thousand. At the same time, the American match
industry imploded, a victim of less demand, increasing labor
costs, and foreign competition. Today, there is only one domestic
manufacturer left: D.D. Bean, situated in New Hampshire.
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- Will
the hobby die out? Not a chance. There will always be people
who recognize the historical and nostalgic worth of matchcovers,
and the attraction of their artwork. Those people will become
tomorrow's collectors. But what about the matchcovers, themselves?
Even if matchcover production completely stopped today, there
are hundreds of millions, if not more, already in existence and
waiting to be discovered in grandfather's shoe boxes, in Aunt
Martha's garage, in dusty attics, and other oft-forgotten cracks
and crevices.
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- We invite
you to join a truly wonderful hobby.