DET DANSKE TÆNDSTIKMUSEUM HIS

I started collecting matchboxes and labels in 1962. Like many boys , I began to collect stamps , but I had a serious competitor in my older brother who always had " usurped " at the top , so I started collecting matchboxes instead. It was not just boxes and labels that interested me , soon I started to get interested in the production , the story and the people around the factories.

My collection grew steadily and after having collected matches, matchboxes and all other things concerning the match industry in more than 45 years , I wanted to open a museum. This was possible because, in the premises we had rented, there was a few more rooms than we needed. During the spring of 2009, I decorated the museum based on a timeline of the Danish matchstick factories and from this I told in small scenes stories from the different factories. In the displays I exhibited labels and matchboxes related to the same factories . The museum was featured in some media and the magazine "Highways" rated my museum as the best small museum in Denmark .

When the lease was too large and our children left home , we choosed to move to something smaller. I was for a long time looking for suitable premises to move the museum into , but unfortunately it has not been possible to obtain premises to pay, so I have currently had to confine my museum into a single small room in our row house.

Since I only had the museum to share my knowledge of matchsticks and tell the Danish industrial history that no one else had done at that time , I choosed to change the museum's website for a virtual museum .

After several times having assisted film production companies , TV and other museums in the matter of matches, I was in the fall of 2009 called by "Den gamle by" (the Old Town) in Aarhus to write a book about the Danish matchstick industry , since untill now were "only" separate stories of individual factories and detached fragments of matchstick industry's history . I presented the idea to my brother , and when he in 2010 took early retirement we decided to throw us into the project.

After the visit to the archives of most of Denmark and researching stacks of records , where we tracked down and copied nearly 25,000 pages of relevant documents of our history , we could in September publish our own book from our own established publishers.

The book which we have named "Svovlstikkerne - en glemt industrihistorie" ( The Matches - a forgotten industrial history) has been a total of 444 pages , where we have selected about 180 illustrations, of which approx. 25 in color.

When the old website was very difficult to maintain, and since I now possessed a much greater knowledge of matches , I have decided to renovate my virtual museum, so it will partly be possible to tell short summaries of the individual factories as well as report on some of things we did not initially be able to find room for in the book.

In our search in the archives , there were several times we came across listed records that you could not find, but as these after the end of the book has emerged from the archives and become available , I will also use the renovated website to tell some of the new stories that have sprung up and show some of the pictures you would you might not be in possession of .

But even though we have been through a lot of material offcourse there is still much I do not know. If you should hold knowledge , you do not think is told , or be something on the pages that you think is wrong , I would of course love to hear it, so I can add or edit pages.

I hope that you will have a fun and an interesting experience and can only suggest to contact me if you have questions or concerns related to matches, match boxes and match the industry's history.

Sincerely,
Hans-Henrik Møller-Andersen