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I’ve got a large lot of matchbooks (maybe 600+ total.) I’ve never dealt with this type of item before and wanted to know what the best practice was for lotting them up. Currently I’m splitting them up by theme (restaurant, hotel, etc) with a a few stragglers that look special (cool cover art, exotic color of match tips, whatever.)
For listings, I’m planning to do something like “35 retro vintage matchbooks from <x>”, maybe $12+shipping. This is kinda what I’m seeing in sold listings, but I also wonder if I could get away with much larger lots (100+) and sticking a higher price on them.
Anyone have any expertise in this area?
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I’m not a matchbook expert. We run away from those huge piles. Most are just junk from junk locations. A Budget Inn in Rockville Maryland circa 1983. Nope. Nope.
But this is our experience with the lots that we have tried to sell. We look for specific hotels, restaurants and landmarks that no longer exist. Like postcards, there are collectors who are looking for memorabilia from places long gone. Some are amateur historians of their region. In the title, you put the names of everything associated with that place: town name, city, restaurant, county, etc. We have some individual match books for $15 this way.
So Im not sure if just lotting them up by “restaurant” is very helpful…unless your target audience are people who will buy your lot to resell.
Anyone here know more about selling matchbooks?
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Steve Shultz showed a big matchbook sale in his video two weeks ago. You can check it out at the link below.
I don’t personally have any experience with matchbooks.
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splitting them up by theme is a great tactic in my opinion
sidebar: sounds like you are guessing at shipping – why not use calculated shipping?
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I like Jay’s suggestion, but might require investing more time/energy than you want. Why not sell the whole lot as a treasure hunter’s lot – estate find – unsorted & unexamined. Describe attributes – United States locales of decade (or range). Then stick the bundle up for whatever $s will cover your investment and storage.
It is pretty easy to go down a rabbit hole with a large lot of something. A relative gave me a box of 1000+ baseball cards. I have zero interest in these things. I passed them on to a friend that is into them. He will some day pass something to me that I am interested in. This is a much more efficient use of both our time/interests.
Presently, I am sorting a big lot of 1960s HO gauge trains and stuff. I was into it 3 hours ago, but I am starting to feel buggy. Hope you all have a good evening, Daniel.
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Thanks for the input, everyone! Although I was never convinced I’d picked something up worth a lot of money, I hoped I’d have 4 or 5 $15+ lots of items from this haul.
Now that I’ve had time to go through around 50% of them: They are boring, unspectacular matchbooks from various restaurants and hotels around the US. Nothing special, which is a little disappointing, but I guess a good reality check. My mode of thinking was, “Someone decided these were worth collecting, so surely there’s some value here,” further drilled in by immediately seeing another collection at the next sale I hopped over to. Turns out something you can easily toss into your pocket and into a “collection” when you get home has barely any value!
I’m going to put them in lots of 100 and sell them off at whatever price I can get for them. I’ll definitely make my money back, but the time invested wasn’t worth it.
Again, thanks for the help – I’d have spent another 2 hours sorting these had you all not stepped in!
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Anything tiki/Hawaiian related is worth researching. Some of those matchbooks go for quite a bit.
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Selling matchbooks is tricky – there are surprising modern sleepers that fetch a lot of $$$, in addition to much older ones that are sometimes good, but the majority are absolutely worthless.
Do they include strikers? What years were they made? What companies made them? What locations do they come from?
There are a lot of nuances that go to matchcover selling that are not really obvious. The depth is there like postcards, but it involves a lot of research and knowledge. Yet, just like postcards, the majority are not worth wasting your time on.
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What are the dangers of shipping a bunch of matches? Would it have to go parcel select (ground)?
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Hi all- I just bought a matchbook cover lot. Mostly they were from NYC and Tokyo in 1950s, so it has been super fun to research. Also a tiki one which sold for $10 single and it was in fairly bad shape.
I lotted by topic “Jewish Delis NYC” ‘NYC Hotels” “NYC Jazz Clubs.” and singled out weird ones like tiki or burlesque bars.
I recently asked the youtube genius, Auction Professor, about matches. He recommended skipping most except something called “feature matches” which are matches that show an image.
There are famous match brands as well which are diff. than the overs.
I mailed my matches USPS first class – WHOOPS.
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