There's a vintage matchbook for everything — especially at this collector's paradise in L.A.

Key Facts

“Matchbooks are the one item that can uncover all the layers of history,” he says, “because every business — and especially restaurants — always had matchbooks, even if the businesses didn’t last, so I can actually take the address of a matchbook and go through the last 100 years of what businesses were at various locations or in various buildings.”
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Pumphrey — who also collects airline matchbooks as a nod to his 30 years working for TWA — says he loves coming to Matchcover Club meetings not just because of the goodies he might come home with but because, as he puts it, “The people there are knowledgeable about everything.
There’s an expert on every particular subject you can imagine, and a lot of the people that come to these meetings have written books, so they’re always looking to uncover history, and matchbooks are a key element of how they do that.”
Considering that the Angelus Club is the country’s third oldest — behind only the national Rathkamp Matchcover Society and the Empire Club out of New York, which started just a year or so earlier — membership should be appealing to those appreciative of the city’s history and heritage.