Anyone ever see a metal matchbook cover like this?

[Diamonds721]

I have owned this beauty for 25 years and fall in love with her each time I admire...anyone out there have a similiar flame?Wow...Is My Match Cover That Rare? I Thought There Would Be More Photos Of Match Covers Than This. Guess I Will Check On The Web. Thanks Gentleman

 

[GWD]

That's amazing, I've never seen anything like it. I didn't even know they made matchbook covers!

 

[scotrace]

I keep stopping by here hoping someone can ID it. Very cool. I wonder if my coolest matchsafe ever friend, Slim Portly, has seen this?


PS: Thread title changed to reflect what it's actually about.

 

[Feraud]

I've seen them before. They are not extremely rare and show up in flea market bins.
Diamonds721, yours is a real beauty. This novice would guess a deco era piecee.

I have a matchsafe that is the Devi's head with ruby eyes. The top of the head flips up to store matches. Match strike on the bottom.

 

[shortbow]

Man, that is a very cool little piece. I've seen tons of match safes, but never one of those. The combination of motifs is excellent, reflects two of my principal interests. What material is it made from?

 

[Diamonds721]

The material is probably some type of silver base metal combination. It doesn't seem to be an aluminum.
Some history on the piece. It was passed down to me from my great-grandfather. He was an engineer for the Santa Fe Railway in the southwestern United States. He had a lot of stories to tell us and probably, since he was a bachelor for a long time, many more he didn't!
Like The Moody Blues Song Goes: Oh What A Lucky Man He Was!!!
Diamonds721

 

[shortbow]

Thanks for the info, Diamonds. BTW, cool avatar!

 

[HarpPlayerGene]

That's funny: I have a T-shirt from a biker bar out in the Seattle area from back in the '80s with that artwork on it. Rather than a native American, the girl just optically blends into a generic male profile. Cool antique you've got there!

 

[ScionPI2005]

That looks pretty unique; I'd never heard of those before. I'll have to keep my eyes open to see if I find any that I can't live without.

 

[tonyscoop1]

Indian Head Metal Matchbook cover

Well, this is a long story but here goes, 35 years ago my parents wanted to go into the campground biz in Colorado, they asked me if I would like to join them in this venture. I said yes and we bought a campground in Cedaredge Colorado in 1976. Soon after that my father passed away from a heart attack. I was out wandering around our property after his passing thinking of what to do next, and while walking around the bottom of the 20 acre parcel found an old dump. Evidently the past owners had used to get rid of their garbage. I started digging around in it looking for old bottles and came across one of these matchbook covers just like yours. I was tickled with my find, but at the time did not think anymore about it, and threw it on my desk, where it got pushed into a drawer and forgotten for some time. One day while cleanning my desk out getting ready for a new one I came across it and decided to polish it up on my buffer, and low and behold it cleaned up beautiful. My wife and I then thought maybe there may be another one in the dump and should search some more. We went back to the dump with tools to get down deeper, and sure enough found about 15 or 20 more covers. Wow! We thought they must have been some give away from a cig company or some kind of premium. The dump covers a area of about 20ft x 40ft, and we had only dug a small amount of it up. We also found some nice insulators which I collect, so I made plans to continue our excavation at a later date. I went back one day and ended up finding a coffee can full of them, the coffee can was packed full of covers and dirt from years of sitting under ground. All this time we had been researching for any info we could find but there was very little out there. This would bring us to about 1985, at our campground we had a retail store and gift shop, an old fashioned soda fountain, and deli. We had become a very popular stop for locals and tourists in the area. One day this man came in and said his family used to own the property back in the 20's to the 40's sometime. He was but a boy then. So I asked him about these matchbook covers, I had one displayed in one of our antique cases in the store. He told me that when he was a boy in the 30's a circus came to town in the city of Delta about 20 miles away, and he and his friend went down to see it. He said back then the circus people would have a parade threw the town to get people interested to come to the show, the circus people would throw free things to the townspeople as free gifts, and these matchbook covers were some of those things, but when the circus was packing up to leave town, a partial box had fallen off the truck and they found it while they were snooping around the area where the circus had been set up. He and his buddy brought them home and had put them in a coffee can and put them on the shelf in the shed and forgot about them till now. He had gone into the service in WWII and he guessed his dad had thrown them in the dump when they where cleaning up the place to sell. And there they sat until I found them. I have been selling them on occasion on ebay since the mid 90's. They are in pretty rough shape when they first come out of the ground, it seems they may have been burnt in a trash fire. Not rusted but, tarnished. Some of the best ones where the first I sold years ago. They where the ones laying on top of the ground. They take quite a bit of cleaning up to get them to look good. But they do clean up. They must be some type of silver, otherwise they would have rusted away like all the other metal in the dump.