Tuesday Flickr Set: Japanese matchbox covers from maraid.
My, oh my. How the weeks escape us! The last time we really took stock of the season, we were busy test-driving bathing suits in anticipation of the warming summer months. McIsaac was — as is his spring custom — favoring the bikini. After all, as he'd maintain (and we certainly agree) that as a hulking Scot, he possesses the abs to go strong or go home. And Hillerns? Well, let's just say he was more comfortable with a conservative one-piece. In black.
By and by, the weeks passed with willy nilly regard for the Tuesday Flickr set. Make no mistake, there was hardly a content deficit. No, it was merely an issue of priority and we were heads-down with new business and the strategic side of personal services. Lo and behold, here we are; staring October dead in the eye. Lest we not digress.
Now, as a matter of house-keeping, we should clear the air and address the whys (of why) we hadn't posted this particular treasure a bit earlier. Conahan (and a few others, it seems) had initially stumbled upon this set a while back. Being half Irish and half Japanese, Conahan zeroes in on certain subjects for which many of us simply can't subscribe. To his credit, he likes his whisk(e)y neat and the televised stunts as can only be delivered by the broadcast media of Japan. Culture can have its hits and its misses and who are we to judge which is which? In this case, we shouldn't have sat on our hands. He had a winner all along.
Jane McDevitt (also known as maraid at Flickr) is the English Web designer who posted this set of early twentieth-century matchbooks from Japan. She credits her friend Michael for the set, which was originally collected by his grandfather. The labels apparently date from between the 1920s and the 1940s. We've seen other similar collections of course, but Ms. McDevitt's deserves special mention.
In Design Literacy, Steve Heller addresses the subject matter, "of all the minor popular arts, matchbox-label design was certainly one of the most major. And out of all the countries that produced matchboxes, the Japanese were at the top of the form. Japan's match industry was exceptionally prodigious, and the designs produced were various, plentiful, and consistent with the early twentieth-century expansion of the nation's heavy industries. Commercial art played an important role, in general, as it developed brand recognition and sales for new industrial products. It put Japanese graphic designers at the forefront of what is now called branding."
For more on the subject, we'd suggest these Filckr pools: The Vintage Japanese Advertising Pool and Vintage Matchbooks and Boxes Pool. We found two good text titles in Matchbox Label Collection 1920-1940's and Matchibako: Japanese Matchbox Art Of The 20s & 30s. And a couple of solid collections can be found here and here. Enjoy. Tanoshimu. 楽しむ