This is a magic bowling game…Now that we live in a world where cigarette smoking is kind of fading away, there’s a whole culture of cigarette smoking and cigarette behavior that we are going to lose. This object is one of those.

It took me a long time to figure out what this was…So it says on the package “Magic Bowling Game. A lighted cigarette starts the action. Score exactly like regular game. Packet contains 20 frames, two complete games plus scorecard.”

There are these yellow pieces of paper that might have been white, I don’t know. But what you are supposed to do is you touch a cigarette to this point down here, and the paper will catch fire but in very specific places. What I think they did was put a flammable material in a path and that would be the “ball” rolling and it would slowly smolder toward the pins and you would score based on which pins burned.

Museum: “The Museum of Disappearing Cigarette Culture”

Exhibited by Jeff Wagg

Transcript edited by Susan Golland