Matches at their most striking

Aaron Kasmin’s drawings hark back to an era when the matchbook was mightier than the billboard

Mid-century America seems to have existed in one vast cloud of tobacco smoke. Think of Lauren Bacall or Franklin DRoosevelt or Cole Porter and chances are you’ll picture each of them with a cigarette smouldering in their mouth.

In the case of Hollywood, particularly, the now maligned habit plays so large a role that it deserves its own credit – a view undoubtedly echoed by the tobacco companies that paid out thousands of dollars to ensure that the era’s temptresses and heroes sparked up on screen.

It is precisely this bygone glamour that came to the artist Aaron Kasmin’s mind when he encountered his first vintage American “feature matchbook” at a French flea market in Normandy about 15 years ago. “Looking at them is like watching old movies,” he says.

Since that first find, Kasmin – whose father, John, is the London dealer who gave David Hockney his first one-man exhibition in 1963 – has collected around 400 matchbooks and set about recreating their minute yet gorgeous designs into A4 and A5 “carbothello” (pastel pencil) drawings. Around 30 are about to be exhibited at Sims Reed Gallery in London, alongside a selection of matchbooks from his collection.

Feature matchbooks are those that have images or words printed across the cardboard match stems. They date from roughly the 1920s to the 1960s, after which disposable lighters and the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking rather put a dampener on things.

The practice of using match covers for advertising, though, reaches much further back in time. Shortly after a cigar-chomping Pensylvannian lawyer named Joshua Pusey patented friction matchbooks in 1892, a cough medicine brand and the Mendelson Opera Company both paid to advertise on them – an example of the latter was insured recently for $25,000 (£18,000). After that, the matchbook fast became the most effective

form of advertising across America.

Kasmin’s beautifully meticulous drawings, which replicate even the creases and blemishes that the actual matchbooks have acquired with age, focus on the particular wares of the New-York based Lion Match Company. Considered the greatest of feature matchbook manufacturers (New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art also has a collection), the company was founded in 1917 by Leo Greenbaum, who arrived in America from Germany at 13 and worked his way up from bootblacking and butchering to become “the match king”.

In its four decades of operation, Lion produced matchbooks for almost every outfit imaginable – even sellers of prosthetic limbs – though Kasmin is particularly fond, he tells me, of those in which the sulphur heads of the matches have been incorporated into the design, in order to represent a bathing hat or a petrol pump, for instance.

“The sheer wit that went into some of them!” he marvels. “I’m constantly captivated.”

‘Looking at them is like watching old movies’: some of Aaron Kasmin’s meticulous images of mid-century ‘feature matchbooks’

Got a light?: between the 1920s and 1960s, matchbooks were considered to be the most effective form of advertising in America