I stum­bled into an amaz­ing cacaphony of match­books about three years ago. Michael Cable’s Wood­side Antiques, an auc­tion house in Far­mville North Car­olina, offered box loads of stuff at the end of a large estate sale. Cable is a mar­velous auc­tion­eer who inserts bits of trivia with every round of bid­ding. I hes­i­tate to admit how much of my house­hold detri­tus and ephemera was pur­chased through his auc­tions. Lots of decap­i­tated dolls and schmucky bric-​à-​brac which some­how became art…

Respond­ing to the “Who’ll start at twenty? Twenty? Ten? Ten? Five? Five? Five?” and jump­ing in at FIVE with no com­pe­ti­tion, I won the mixed lot. We’d arrived late at the auc­tion and didn’t go through this box of joy, so imag­ine my sur­prise when what I thought were cigar boxes were actu­ally fruit­cake boxes. Ten of them. Filled with match­books. And another large Mason Shoe box filled with match­boxes. Inter­na­tional in scope and copi­ous in num­ber, this col­lec­tion is astound­ing because of its diversity.

So — I searched around for a way to con­tain them since I needed the fruit­cake boxes for an assem­blage project. I bought plas­tic archival qual­ity sleeves from Hob­by­Mas­ter. Great prod­ucts, good ser­vice, qual­ity — and I don’t get a kick­back from the link. If you check the match­book gallery, you’ll get a pretty good idea on just what came in those fruit­cake boxes.

That par­tic­u­lar auc­tion was the estate of a woman who saved every­thing, but not in a hoarder, sty­ro­foam con­tainer kind of way. There were let­ters, boxes of per­sonal cor­re­spon­dence and buy­ers really snapped to atten­tion when bid­ding for those. I think one box­ful went for over $85 which shows you ephemera is going for more than it used to. Marty was there from ECU’s Joyner Library — he rep­re­sents the NC Col­lec­tion, I think. I knew him decades ago when work­ing on a grad­u­ate fel­low­ship for Spe­cial Col­lec­tions. His pres­ence sig­naled “worth some­thing” because his sniff­ing around means real his­tory is on sale.

So, all of the sud­den I’m ram­bling on about an auc­tion. That’s because I’m try­ing to fig­ure out what came in through the front door over the last seven years and what needs to go out the back. There’s a yard sale to ben­e­fit our local dog park and it’s next week so this gives me the incen­tive to sweep the halls and clos­ets clean of some of our EXTRAS.

Back to this auc­tion — I bid on another “lot” of items and it turned out to be a box­ful of hand­made lace, linens and a cou­ple dresses from the Vic­to­rian era. Incred­i­bly intri­cate, beau­ti­ful … breath­tak­ing. There’s a photo in here some­where of the lace, let me find it and post it.