Vintage NOS 1970s Coca-Cola Matchbook 🔥 "Coke Adds Life" Unused Advertising Giveaway

Advertising in Your Shirt Pocket 🔥 A Vintage 1970s Coca-Cola Coke Adds Life Matchbook, D.D. Bean & Sons, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

Size: 2" x 1 1/2"

Before advertising lived on a screen, it lived in your pocket - a free book of matches off the counter at a diner, a filling station or a corner store, used to light a cigarette or the stove and tossed by the end of the week. This one never got used. It's a single paper matchbook: on the front, the white Enjoy Coca-Cola script and Trade Mark (R) riding the white wave on Coca-Cola red; on the back, white, a red Coke with its trade mark and, in black script, adds life to... everything nice, over a dark brown striker strip, with a metal staple at the fold. Along the bottom flap in small red letters: D.D. BEAN & SONS CO., JAFFREY N.H. Every one I have is unstruck.

📅 The 1970s

Nothing on it is dated, but the slogan is. Coke Adds Life was Coca-Cola's national campaign from 1976, until Have a Coke and a Smile replaced it in 1979, so this book comes from those late-70s years, when a matchbook by the register was still one of the cheapest ways a brand could ride home in somebody's pocket. The same front-and-back design was also printed by other match makers, like Superior Match of Chicago - Coca-Cola's art, each match company's own book.

🔥 D.D. Bean & Sons

D.D. Bean & Sons was started in 1938, right in the Depression, by Delcie D. Bean Sr. and his sons Vernon and Delcie Jack Bean Jr., in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, to make paper book matches with advertising on the covers. Delcie had already been in the match business with wooden matches, and the family bought an old mill in town and used machinery from match companies that hadn't made it, and had their first matchbooks coming off the line by June 1938. Local legend holds that the company earned itself the nickname the last match company standing - a title passed down among collectors and old Jaffrey residents alike as the American match industry consolidated and shrank around it over the decades, while the Bean family kept right on running matchbooks off the same New Hampshire mill floor. And the legend came true: D.D. Bean bought Atlas Match in 2016 and is the last maker of book matches in the United States and Canada.

🏔️ Jaffrey

Jaffrey sits under Mount Monadnock, one of the most climbed mountains in the country, in a corner of southern New Hampshire built on timber, mills and small manufacturing. The white pine that once fed the wooden-match trade grew all around it, and the Beans just swapped the tree for a tiny cardboard billboard.

🥤 Two faces of Coke

Turn the book over and you get two eras of Coca-Cola selling. The front is the script Frank Robinson wrote out back in Atlanta in 1886, needing nothing but Enjoy and the red. The back is fresh 1970s copywriting meant to make a Coke feel like part of every party, kitchen and holiday - everything nice. Matchbooks were made for brands like that: small, bold, and riding home in everybody's pocket. Collectors call themselves phillumenists, and an unstruck book from a big campaign is exactly what that hobby was built to save.

🔥 About these

They're about 2 by 1 1/2 inches. Drop one in a Coca-Cola collection, a matchbook album or a 70s kitchen shelf - and please don't strike it. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Coke Adds Life matchbooks again, and once these last unstruck ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.