We again take up the subject of match books, or book matches, the excuse this time being that the match industry is now celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the book match.

Actually, the first book matches were invented and made back in 1892 by a Philadelphia patent attorney named, so help us, Joshua Pusey, but the Diamond Match Company, which more or less is the match industry, dates the semi centennial from 1895, when it bought Pusey's patent and started production.

Pusey snipped his first book match out of cardboard with a pair of office shears and cooked the match-head and striking-surface mixtures on his office stove. Having failed to blow himself up, he proceeded to staple fifty matches into a book and christen his new product Flexibles. He spent the next three years defending the invention in lawsuits, and was apparently relieved when he sold out to Diamond.

Diamond started manufacturing book matches in a plant in Barberton, Ohio. Its top daily output was around a hundred and fifty thousand; if you think that's a high number, wait a while. The first book matches were sold to the public (not given away), had no advertising on their covers, and were regarded as a flimsy and dangerous novelty. The earliest extant match book to carry advertising is a hand-lettered affair made in 1986 and distributed with the compliments of the Mendelson Opera Company, which was billed as "A cyclone of fun - powerful caste - pretty girls - handsome ward-robe - get seats early." It bore pasted-on photographs of the star of this immortalized organization, a trombonist named Thomas Lowden, who was described on the book as "America's Youngest Operatic Comedian."

In 1896, Diamond turned its book match department, which is considered a white elephant, over to a young go-getter named Henry C. Traute, who persuaded the company to put the striking surface outside the book, instead of inside, where the suicidal Pusey had put it, and to print "Close cover before striking" on the flap. This was the second great step forward in the match-book business.

Traute then went to Milwaukee and got an order from the Pabst Brewery for ten million match books advertising Blue Ribbon Beer. He followed this with a thirty-million match-book order from Duke, the tobacco man. The stampede was on. His biggest order was for a billion books advertising Wrigley's Chewing Gum. He died last September.

It was Traute who worked out the system whereby the match company sells match-book advertising to various concerns, then handles the distribution of the matches throughout the country, making sure, among other things, that whiskey advertising doesn't turn up in a dry county. Match books cost tobacco vendors about a fifth of a cent apiece. The vendors thought they were giving them away as a favor to customers until the O.P.A., during the war, ruled that the presentation of matches with cigarettes had become so general and so automatic that the practice must be regarded as mandatory. Match-book prices hadn't gone up (they haven't in fifty years), so the vendors didn't complain much.

Five hundred billion matches are manufactured in this country every year now. About two hundred billion of them are wooden "strike-anywhere" matches, a hundred billion are wooden safety matches, and the rest are book matches.

The head of a match may contain as many as thirty-two substances, including potassium chlorate, zinc oxide, sulphur, glue, starch, resin, ground glass (seems like nonsense to us), clay, plaster of Paris, paraffin, formaldehyde, dyes, and pigments. Some of these are tossed in to slow down the rate of burning; otherwise, the match might flare up and go out like a pinch of gunpowder. In addition, about a quarter of an inch of the top of the ordinary book match is dipped in paraffin to sustain the flame. The paper is also impregnated with ammonium phosphate, which prevents afterglow when a match is extinguished. Diamond employs testers to light and blow out sample paper matches as they come from the machines. There is a man in the Diamond plant in Oswego, New York, who has blown out three thousand matches a day since 1909. He's nearly as busy as a queen termite, which lays an egg every twenty-one seconds.

To date, about 2,500,000,000,000 (that's two and a half trillion) book matches have been manufactured in this country. Figuring twenty matches to a book, that's a hundred and twenty five billion books. Figuring...But that way lies madness. The largest match-book-cover collection in the world is said to be that of a man in Fort Worth. He has over fifty thousand match-book covers.