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The Discovery
One winter afternoon in the attic of my husband's grandmother's house I found a little dusty box labeled "matches". I opened it and out spilled 1000 matchbooks from all over the U.S.: matchbooks this little southern fireball collected on her driving adventures in the 1930's & 40's. They are a union of opposites: ordinary, yet one-of-a kind; romantic, yet utilitarian; innocent, yet sophisticated. They are meaningful symbols of American life - mom and pop stores, independent franchises, tiny restaurants, little extant oasis' of independence surviving against the odds even as bigger businesses began to sweep over the country.
A Collection
Their humbleness is emotionally compelling, especially when viewed as a collection. The more you can paste to your refrigerator door, the more powerful they become, little soldiers that fight to show you something rare and important. Long ago these little matchbooks sold products; today they testify to the absolute value of every single human being; these humble little pieces of art are evangelists of personal destiny, infinitely valuable reminders of the supreme significance of a single human life, especially in these times when we sometimes forget that we are important, when we often feel like a faceless, helpless number.
The Treasure
Ultimately they are extraordinarily beautiful; I hope you see in them all that I saw that cold afternoon as I let them fall through my hands like golden coins, my heart racing at the rare, rare treasure I beheld, a secret collection that is probably the only one of its kind in the world. It is not an exaggeration to say that we believe in these little magnets and that they carry a power of their own.
The Magnets
To build our products, which are custom made when you order, we take a high resolution photograph of the matchbook, especially trying to reveal its "oldness". (The image you see here is exactly the image we laminate to make your magnet.) After we laminate each photograph, we affix the image to a magnet. Our joy is to make a high quality, spiritually vested product. We use a very expensive magnet, twice the thickness of the average business card magnet - 60 mil thick - strong enough to hold many items onto your refrigerator; you can feel the satisfying slap of it when the magnet senses the metal. So our artwork is useful, not just beautiful.
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