Time Travel Tuesday: Vintage Matchbook Covers

Image via Pick­adol­la.

Chances are that if you are a small, illus­trat­ed prod­uct from the mid­dle of the 20th cen­tu­ry, I prob­a­bly love you. Recent­ly, I have cov­ered postage stamps and scout badges, all exist­ing from a time coined “mid cen­tu­ry mod­ern.” Today I’m fea­tur­ing vin­tage match­book covers.

I’ve used the term mid cen­tu­ry mod­ern before, but haven’t both­ered to real­ly describe it. For your ref­er­ence: It is a blan­ket term used to describe a num­ber of cre­ative endeav­ors from the years 1933 — 1965. This includes archi­tec­ture, graph­ic design, and indus­tri­al design.

A lot of the illus­tra­tion and prod­ucts from this peri­od of time look dif­fused in both col­or and image qual­i­ty. This hap­pened because off­set lith­o­g­ra­phy print­ing (which is used in print­ing news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, etc.) was often print­ed onto paper with a high-rag con­tent. Rag paper uses cot­ton rags (hence the name) as its mate­r­i­al source, so print­ing on it gives the appear­ance of being on fabric.

Well! That was a lot expla­na­tion about the con­text sur­round­ing vin­tage match­book cov­ers. Hope­ful­ly you enjoy these bold designs from through­out the world. If you watch a lot of Mad Men, you prob­a­bly see how much peo­ple from this era enjoyed smok­ing, so it’s no won­der why these are so engaging.

3 images above via Found in Mom’s Base­ment.

2 above images via Chris­t­ian Mon­tone’s Flickr.

By Saul Bass! Image via design:related.

2 images above via Dark Roast­ed Blend.