My name is Bud Rayner and I have been picking up matchbooks since 1948, when I was nine years old and my dad let me keep the one from the motor court where we stayed on the way to my grandmother's in Missouri. I didn't know I was "collecting" anything. I just liked the little picture of the cabins with the moon over them. Fifty-one years later I have somewhere north of two thousand of them, mostly motels and diners, and my wife Arlene says the cigar boxes have finally taken over the spare room for good.

This page is my attempt to put the collection where other folks can see it, since I can't very well invite the whole country over to look at cigar boxes. I do not have a scanner (my grandson says I should get one, and I probably will next year), so for now you'll have to take my word on the pictures and let me describe them. A matchbook is only two inches tall but a good one has a whole motel on it — the sign, the swimming pool, the slogan, and the phone number with the exchange name still on it. To me each one is a room I stayed in, or wish I had.

Collectors call them matchcovers, by the way, because most of us take the matches out. I'll explain that below.

Very few motel matchbooks have a year printed on them, so you learn to read the clues. Here are the ones I use most. None of them is perfect by itself, but put three or four together and you can usually land within a few years.

Fair warning: old motels reordered their matchbooks for years without changing the art, so a cover with 1950s art can have been printed in 1966. The art dates the design; the little details date the printing.

When I was a kid I kept them in a shoebox with the matches in. Do not do this. Old matches crumble, the heads flake off and stain the cover, and a couple thousand of them in one room is a fire marshal's bad dream. Nearly every serious collector removes the matches, and here is how you do it without wrecking anything:

1. Open the cover and find the staple. Slip a thin, dull blade under the two prongs on the back and gently pry them straight. Don't yank.
2. Lift the comb of matches out. Throw the matches away (or keep a few in a coffee can for lighting the grill, as I do).
3. You can leave the staple holes as they are. Most collectors don't restaple. A cover with the matches removed is called a flat, and that's the standard way to collect.

Then the flats go into album pages. I use the clear plastic pages with slits, where the cover tucks in at the corners and you can slide it out again without tape or glue. Never glue a matchbook down and never put tape on one; it ruins it for good and it ruins it for the next fellow too. Keep the albums out of sunlight (the reds fade first), out of the basement (damp), and out of the attic (heat). The spare room closet is about right. I write the state, town and my best guess at the year in pencil on a slip tucked behind each one.

Full books — matches still in, never struck — I keep only for a few special ones, in a tin, and Arlene knows exactly where that tin is.

I counted everything again in August (rainy week). The total is 2,014 motel and diner covers, plus a shoebox of gas stations and cafes that I don't count. Route 66 states are the heart of it because those are the roads we drove. Here's the tally and a few of the motels in each box. Every motel here is one I either stayed at or wish I had.

People ask which one is the most valuable, and I honestly don't know or much care. These are the ones I would grab first if the house was on fire (which, with two thousand matchbooks in it, is not entirely a joke).

Ozark Rest Cabins, near Lebanon, Missouri (about 1947). The first one. A front striker, a dark blue cover with six white cabins and a crescent moon, and on the inside: "Modern Cabins • Steam Heat • Reasonable Rates." The staple is rusted and the corner is bent from fifty years in my pocket and then a shoebox. Not for trade at any price.

Sunset Trail Motel, Tucumcari, New Mexico (1950s). The prettiest one I own. Pink and turquoise, a kidney-shaped swimming pool with a lady on a diving board, and the sign in that tall thin lettering they all used. Tucumcari had more neon per block than anywhere I've been. Arlene and I stayed in Tucumcari on our honeymoon in 1961, though not at this one; we couldn't afford the pool.

Longhorn Motor Hotel, Amarillo, Texas (about 1960). A thirty-stick "giant" cover, twice the usual size, with a steer skull printed in real gold ink. It came out of an estate sale in Peoria in 1994 in a box of otherwise nothing.

Coffee Cup Diner, Joliet, Illinois (1950s). Just a big yellow cup on a red background and the words "Open All Nite." I ate there many times as a young man on the way home from work. The diner is gone. The cover is not.

Painted Cliffs Motor Court, Holbrook, Arizona (1940s). A little cover with a lot going on: striped cliffs, a teepee, a car with running boards, and the line "Wire for Reservations." No phone number at all. Somebody drove a long way to sleep there.

Estate sales are the mother lode. Somebody's grandfather traveled for a living in 1955 and dropped a matchbook in a desk drawer every Friday for thirty years, and now the family is selling the desk. Ask whoever is running the sale if there's a jar or a drawer of matchbooks; they usually haven't priced them, and a couple of dollars for a coffee can full is a fair deal for everybody. Go early. Go the second day too, when the drawers get emptied onto a table.

Flea markets and antique malls have them, but priced one at a time, and the dealers have learned the word "collectible." I still look.

Trades with other collectors. The best way to fill in states. My rule is one for one, and I always send the better cover.

The motels themselves, when they still stand. Most of the old places on 66 that are still open will happily hand you one from the front desk. Ask nicely, buy a postcard while you're at it, and stay the night if you can. That's the whole point.

I belong to a matchcover club here in the Midwest, about sixty members, and we put out a little newsletter called The Striker every other month. It runs about eight pages, typed on a member's computer and copied at the print shop: a trade list, a "mystery cover" column where somebody sends in a cover nobody can identify, a reference article (last issue was on dating by union labels), and the news of who found what. We meet twice a year at a church hall with our albums and a lot of coffee. I wrote the September article on estate sale etiquette, which mostly says don't be a vulture and always thank the family.

If you collect and want to trade, or you have a jar of old motel covers and don't know what to do with them, e-mail me and I'll answer. I check the machine every evening after supper.

This is the part I really made the page for. A matchbook is a cheap way to remember where you slept.

1948, Illinois to Missouri. Dad's Plymouth, no radio, my sister car-sick the whole way. Ozark Rest Cabins. I have described that one enough already, but I will add that I remember the cabin smelling of pine and kerosene and that it was the first time I ever slept somewhere that wasn't home.

1961, the honeymoon. Arlene and I drove Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles and back in a used Ford with a bad heater in September and October. Fourteen matchbooks on the way out, eleven on the way home. Tucumcari, Gallup, Holbrook, Kingman, Needles. We had ninety dollars and a thermos. I've never been happier and I've told her so.

1972, the kids. Station wagon, four children, a cooler, and Arlene's mother. We took two weeks to get to the Grand Canyon. Half the motels from 1961 were still open and half of them had put in a pool. Most of the covers from that trip are back-strikers — the new kind — which is how I first noticed the change.

1987, the last drive on the whole road. Just the two of us again. The interstate had been finished for a few years and we went looking for what was left. A lot of the signs were dark. I got a matchbook from the Sunset Trail's front desk that morning, from a lady who said they'd had the same box of them since the seventies. I didn't argue.

1999. We are planning one more, next spring, Arlene willing. Kingman to Amarillo, slow, with the albums in the trunk so I can hold the old covers up to what's still standing. If you see an old fellow in a parking lot holding a matchbook up to a motel sign, that's me. Say hello.