Why we kept every plate

When I catalogued the four-thousandth plate, my son asked why we kept the failures. This is the answer I gave him, edited for the parts I thought of later.

Sentiment started it. My grandfather's drawer of rival boxes, bought at auctions where grieving printers sold their life's work by the crate, was pure feeling: grief, greed, and a collector's eye he would never have named. When I began the ledger in 1979 I promised myself I was doing something more rigorous than hoarding.

Rigour arrived as a surprise. Matchbox labels are the only advertising medium that had to earn its place in a stranger's pocket. Nobody bought a box for the label, so a label had no captive audience to lie to. The swimmers are genuinely heroic because the town genuinely swam. The racing cars are fast because the town, on regatta week, believed in speed. You can read a country's mood off a wall of these things, decade by decade, more honestly than off its newspapers.

So the thesis became: the matchbox was the smallest billboard in the country, and because it was small, it had to be true. The archive is not a collection of pictures. It is a catalogue of promises, kept at pocket scale.

The failures stay in the drawers with the rest. The plate that got the hedgehog wrong twice. The summer range nobody bought. A label is a promise, and a kept record of broken promises is the only kind worth keeping.

Mira Strikewell founded the archive and ran it until 2014. Her drawer index remains in use.