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HOME A-L M-Z The Cabinet Collecting The Loungespot |
Collecting Las Vegas Casino matchbooks is fun, easy, and cheap. What more could you ask from good old Sin City, Nevada? Many people ask where I've gotten my matchbooks from. The answer is, many places. Ben and I started a habit of grabbing matchbooks from various casinos each time we made one of our frequent trips to Vegas. Those matchbooks started to slowly pile up in an large margarita glass that we had in our living room. I never had any intention of starting a real collection, but we kept filling the glass up anyways. It was only recently that I mentioned to my father that we had a very small, yet growing pile of, what was at the time, modern casino matchbooks. He got very excited and dug out a huge snifter glass full of... matchbooks! He had been hiding this thing for years, as I had never seen it before in my life. Not only were there awesome vintage matchbooks from all over southern California, but there was a very large stash of vintage Vegas matchbooks as well. I spent the whole afternoon examining each one, and took home a big bag of swanky matchbook goodness. Now we had a problem. All of these great Vegas matchbooks (about 60 at this time), and no way for anyone to really get a good look at them. That night I went to Aaron Bros. and picked up a large shadow box display case. I cut notches in the inner frame, and tied pieces of fishing line across in several rows to make lines for the books to hang on. When it was all said and done, it looked fantastic, but had two problems. a) It just barely fit all the matchbooks I had, there would be no room to expand. b) You couldn't see the backs of the matchbooks, and there was no easy way to get inside to pick one up. I knew that eventually, I'd have to make a custom display case but for the moment, all was good. Almost a week after I finished that case, my father suprised me by delivering a bag of over FIFTY more vintage Vegas matchbooks that he found at his uncle's house. Good old Uncle Kurt was kind enough to donate all these matchbooks to my collection. Now with well over 100 matchbooks, and the burning (PUN!) desire to collect more, it was obvious that the time had come for a very large and very awesome display case. Check out the Cabinet page for more info on that. I have been continually collecting Vegas matchbooks since I've finished the cabinet. Many matches can be found for very little money on e-bay. Try searching for "vegas matchbook", "vegas matchbooks", and "vegas matches". These three searches will usually yield a completely different set of results. Of course, nothing beats actually going to Vegas and going into the casinos to collect your matchbooks - but this will only yield modern matchbooks. If you're in Vegas and want to check out some great vintage matchbooks, be sure to head over to the Tropicana's Casino Legends Hall of Fame museum. There's a gift shop right in front of the museum. They have some display cases of very nice, very old, and WAY overpriced vintage matchbooks. They're nice to look at, but you won't see me paying $50 for a matchbook anytime soon, no matter how awesome it is. What you do want to look at though, is the large glass jars by the cash register. Although, not as old as the ones in the display case, you'll find plenty of 'slighty-vintage' casino matchbooks here for 50 cents a piece. I've gotten quite a few great matchbooks by digging around in these jars. And finally, if you're interested, I have many duplicates of the matchbooks in my collection, and would be very interested in trading. If you'd like more information, go ahead and e-mail me at jeff AT twentysix.net. |
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