Hey, Buddy! Got a light? Andy does.

Collections of esoterica tend to languish, forgotten, in attics and musty cellars. Andy Resek decided to do something different with a collection of vintage matchbooks that had been squirreled away by his grandparents over the course of a lifetime. He snapped close-ups of his favorites and posted them on the web. It's the sort of thing that more of us should find time to do, because it keeps the always-tenuous link to the past alive.

Andy reminisces, "There was one drawer in a bureau in their entryway that was overflowing with matchbooks from all over the place – they traveled quite a bit in their retirement years. I always thought it was funny that they had bothered to keep these things around.

Gramps died while I was in high school, preceded by Grammy a few years earlier. While we were going through their belongings, deciding what to keep and such, I came across their matchbook collection. At that age, it wasn’t really my place to decide about who was keeping the bigger things, but I felt really strongly about holding onto the matchbooks. I wasn’t as into old/vintage things back then, but it was all of a sudden really important to me to hang onto these artifacts that seemed so ephemeral and easily tossed out."

Check out some of Andy's favorites at World of Wonder. While you're at it, pester him to post more.