Loren Moore commissioned the development of the matchcovercollector.com website to meet several objectives he had in mind. These goals included facilitating the process of trading matchcovers with other collectors and sorting matchcovers from his vast matchcover collection into different “virtual collections”. But perhaps the most important and unselfish feature of the matchcovercollector.com website is the ability to share images of old matchcovers with the public. Anyone with an internet-enabled computer can freely access this website and enjoy all of the matchcover images displayed in color.
Matchcover collecting as a hobby was very dynamic and active in the middle of the 20th century. After all, millions of new matchbooks were being produced by many manufacturers daily and distributed by tens of thousands of businesses during that time. Even though matchbook production has fallen to about nil today, there are many people who still participate in the hobby and have large and interesting collections of old matchcovers. One problem is that essentially all of these collections are hidden away in boxes or albums that sit on shelves in the collectors’ private homes month after month, year after year. Matchcovers themselves are not easy to share with the public. How many times does any matchcover collector open up the inner sanctum of their collecting room to the public? Well, they do not.
What Loren Moore has done with his matchcovercollector.com website is to allow matchcover images to be shared with everyone in the world. When Loren offered Phil the opportunity to participate in his website, he jumped at the chance to share his Route 66 (US Highway 66) matchcover collection.
Although Phil has been collecting Route 66 matchcovers for over 25 years, he knows of two other collectors who have more comprehensive collections than he does and many others who have substantial number of matchcovers that are not included in any of these collections. Phil enlisted some of them to provide their Route 66 matchcover images so he could upload them all to the website. Consequently the over-7500 images of Route 66 matchcovers that you see here are a collaboration of about eight contributors from the Route 66 matchcover collector community. This “virtual collection” of Route 66 matchcovers exists here only in cyber-space and is much larger than any of our individual physical collections and is certainly the largest Route 66 matchcover “collection” in the world.
This database was built on the Word Press platform. But it is apparent now that a massive image database is not really a good fit for Word Press but we are committed to this platform for the foreseeable future. Therefore visitors to this website should access it via a desktop or laptop computer. The database looks fine when doing so. Using a personal device like a phone or tablet, especially one running the Android operating system, will frustrate visitors. (Devices from Apple do better than those running Android but actual computers are the best way to access the website.)
We hope anyone who has an interest in Route 66 will enjoy this matchcover archive.
Thank you,
Phil Gordon and Loren Moore