Was the time when any restaurateur worthy of his salt wrapped the dining experience around a book of matches. Like miniature billboards, these relics of a time when smokers accompanied their meals with between rounds cigarettes and end of the evening cigars have pretty much died out as a marketing tool – too many negatives.

I quit smoking in ’96 and haven’t looked back since, but last weekend I came across this nostalgic collectable while exploring a new restaurant, The Blue Fish Sushi, in Boca Raton.

I grabbed one of the colorful mementos on the way out with the idea of adding it to my small, packed away collection of dusty keepsakes from another era. Matchbooks were a fine example of the graphic designer’s art and it struck me as ironic that even though the heyday of this particular vehicle’s come and gone, a new need for small format graphics has taken its place: the cell phone.