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Lunch boxes have long been staples of garage sales and thrift shops. Now they are appearing at antiques markets and shows, and if "Mr. Lunch Box" has his way, within three years they will be auctioned at Sotheby's and Christie's.

"Mr. Lunch Box," also known as Scott Bruce, is the number one "boxer," as lunchbox collectors are called. Author of two new softcover books on '50s and '60s lunch boxes, he also publishes "Hot Boxing," a quarterly newsletter for more than 400 lunch-box collectors. Mr. Lunch Box Inc. will launch the first mail auction of lunch boxes this spring.

Bruce has recently curated a traveling lunch-box exhibition based on his collection of more than 1,500 items. After touring the United States for three years, the exhibition will go to Japan, where there is already strong interest.

To corner the lunch-box market, Bruce spent three years driving across the country in his station wagon, checking out thrift shops and flea markets. "When I could no longer see out the rear window, I would find a UPS depot, pack them up and ship them home to Boston," he recounted. Lunch boxes have been increasing in value at the rate of 100 percent a year, according to Bruce.

"Boxers who have invested $2,500 in blue-chip lunch boxes in the last three to five years can expect to realize $10,000 to $15,000 in the market," he writes in the first edition of the Official Price Guide to Lunch Box Collectibles (House of Collectibles, $9.95). In addition to 2,000 prices, the book lists 25 North American decorators, lithographers and manufacturers of lunch boxes and 32 lunch-box artists. It has a glossary that explains that a kit is a lunch box and thermos bottle; a munchie's bag is a zippered vinyl bag with a strap handle made by KingSeeley Thermos (it's similar to Aladdin's brunch bag), and a "heavyweight boxer" is an advanced collector with 500 individual boxes.

"Like the fascination with big finned cars of the '50s, the appeal of lunch boxes is emotional," Bruce recalls in The Fifties and Sixties Lunch Box (Chronicle Books, $14.95), a coffee-table picture book with a short text.

"In school it wasn't what you drove - it was what you carried," he writes. "The box reflected the real you. A blue Beatles flashed 'hip'; the class princess carried a sleek Barbie; the class clown "Get Smart"; the beleaguered new guy had the Chuck Wagon with scenes of staving off an attack; the firecracker-throwing, crazy kid bashed around a Buccaneer, and naturally everyone felt superior to that poor kid whose mom made him carry a Red Plaid."

The TV-screen format of the classic lithographed steel lunch box captures the nostalgia of Saturday morning and prime-time TV shows and provides an index to mid-20th-century popular culture. Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger, Annie Oakley, Zorro, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Star Trek, Superman, Batman, Tarzan, Flipper, the Jetsons and the Flintstones look out from these simulated TV sets that once held peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and tangerines.

Bruce estimates that more than 120 million lunch boxes were sold in America between 1950 and 1970 at from $2.39 for a Hopalong Cassidy kit to $3.50 for a 1969 Laugh-In. The Hoppy was the first character lunch box, and 600,000 sold the first year. The maker, Aladdin, had even more success with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, in 1952. In 1953 Roy Rogers and Dale Evans got their faces on a lunch box made by American Thermos, which in 1959 was called King-Seeley Thermos. (Aladdin and King-Seeley Thermos are the Coke and Pepsi of the industry.)

Bruce also names the industrial designers responsible for such graphic innovations as putting tooled-leather gun belts around the sides of square boxes and turning the familiar workman's domed lunch boxes into chuck wagons and pirate chests.

The highest prices are paid by collectors of Beatles and Disneyana. Ted Hake's Americana Auction sold a black vinyl Beatles Kaboodle Kit for $600, topping a previous high of $300. A California collector has advertised that he will pay $1,000 for a 1935 Geuder, Paeschke & Frey Mickey Mouse lunch kit, considered the holy pail of tin-litho oval lunch boxes. One has sold for $500. More common Disney lunch boxes from the 1950s are selling from $75 to $125; add $15 or $20 if the thermos has survived.

Serious collectors keep on top of the market by subscribing to Hot Boxing, the quarterly newsletter of lunch-box collecting ($12 a year from Hot Boxing, Box 87, Somerville, Mass. 02143). They can also subscribe to the Mr. Lunch Box Inc. mail auctions (send $3 for a catalogue to the same address).

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