Matchbooks at Biff Tannen's Pleasure Paradise Casino & Hotel.
- "Say, Marty! Marty! I wanted to show you these new matchbooks from my auto detailing I had printed up... a flying DeLorean? What the hell is going on here?"
- —Biff Tannen
- "The DeLorean rose higher, with all three of them [Doc, Marty and Jennifer] too busy and excited to look where they had come from — behind them, where Biff Tannen walked out of the house, the new matchbook he'd just had printed, 'Biff's Auto Detailing', held proudly in his hand. And not one of them, Doc, Marty or Jennifer, turned back to see Biff, the matchbook forgotten in his hand, as he watched open-mouthed while the DeLorean soared upward into the sky, then disappeared into the future."
- —From Back to the Future Part II by Craig Shaw Gardner (quote, pages 11 and 12)
A matchbook was a small paperboard folder containing a number of cardboard matches, with a striking surface on the outside, which was given away by companies for promotional purposes.
History
Biff Tannen had matchbooks printed to advertise Biff's Auto Detailing and give to his customers. He was intending to show one of these to Marty McFly in 1985 when he witnessed the flying DeLorean time machine departing for 2015.
In 1985A, Marty took a matchbook from Biff Tannen's Pleasure Paradise Casino & Hotel, which he used to destroy the Gray's Sports Almanac in 1955. Before Marty's eyes, the text on the matchbook's cover changed from PLEASURE PARADISE to AUTO DETAILING. In a kind of poetic justice, Marty had burned the almanac using a matchbook advertising the business empire that this very book had made possible.
