The
Art of the Cigar Label
Tampa's Colorful Cigar
Labels are More Than Just Pretty Pictures
by Emanuel Leto
It seems cigar labels are everywhere lately.
T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads and shower curtains
are emblazoned with images all too familiar to
native Tampans. It's
one way we can connect with and embrace our city's
legacy as the "Cigar City." Cigar labels
- whether adorned by an attractive woman or a famous
writer - jump out at the viewer. However, cigar labels
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are also
rich in symbolic imagery. Labels can reflect, in
the words of one historian, "the tobacco industry's
important influence on the economic, social, and
political climate of Cuba and …Tampa," and
are often "windows to the past," depicting
contemporary events, celebrities, and social life.
Cigar labels are also among the earliest forms of
popular advertising, illustrating the country's
shift from an industrial economy to one based on
consumer goods.
Crossroads: Transportation, printing, and the consumer
economy
Prior to the Civil War, cigars were only a
small part of overall tobacco consumption, easily
outpaced by snuff and hand-rolled cigarettes. Tobacco
farmers sold their product in small bundles, tied
together with a cloth ribbon, to local traders and
dry goods stores in and around their local community.
There was no need to label cigars individually, no
need for competitive advertising. After the Civil
War, however, both the cigar and advertising industries
would change to meet the demands of a new American
marketplace.
In 1865 Congress passed the Tax Revenue Act requiring
standardized packaging and tax identification numbers
for all tobacco products. Cigars were now boxed and
stamped with a factory number to identify the manufacturer,
a tax district number identifying the city of origin,
and the quantity contained in the box. Standardized
packaging and labeling aided sales and worked well
in an emerging consumer-based economy.
By 1889, 61,272 miles of rail lines connected the
continent, revolutionizing the flow of people and
goods throughout the country. Mileage in the South
tripled as Henry Plant completed his rail line in
1884. Consumer goods - like tobacco, soap, or clothing
- could now be shipped thousands of miles away from
the factories that produced them to be displayed
in shop windows in dozens of American cities.
The Need for Advertising
The railroad connected America
like never before. People and goods traveled quicker
and with more frequency to seemingly distant places
within the American landscape. More people were living
in cities with more products and more choices than
were available in rural communities. Productivity
was on the rise as well. Goods were made cheaply
and more efficiently, pre-packaged, and shipped to
new, far-away markets. These rapid and complex changes
in the American marketplace required that manufacturers
develop a new strategy to entice consumers into buying
their products. Advertising was the answer. Before
advertising, "tobacco
was tobacco and soap was soap."
Using copyrights, patents, and brand names, manufacturers
could make their product seem unique or different
from their competitor's and advertising reinforced
a product's perceived special qualities.
Department stores and chain stores met the demand
of growing urban populations. For example, Woolworth
operated about 600 outlets by 1913. Window-shopping
soon became a popular pastime and window displays
were a primary form of advertising, second only to
print ads. Instead of being stacked on shelves behind
the counter, cigar boxes were now displayed with
their lids open. Capturing a customer's attention
became as important as the quality of the cigar itself.
The Evolution of the Stone Lithography
Lithography
or "chemical printing" revolutionized
the printing industry. With lithography, it was possible
to print hundreds of duplicate copies from a single
image drawn directly onto a stone without reducing
the quality of the image.
Alois Senefelder, a German printer, invented stone
lithography in 1796. It is a planographic process,
meaning that images images are not carved or cut
into the printing stones. Rather, lithography is
based on "the natural antipathy between water
and grease."
Using a grease pen or crayon, the artist draws an
image directly on the stone. Like all paper printing
processes, the artist must draw a reverse image.
Once the artwork is complete, the stone is doused
with a slightly acidic solution called an etch. Next,
the stone is rinsed with water; the acid solution
sticks to the grease drawing but is washed away from
the rest of the stone leaving only the image to be
printed.
With the image set into the stone, a roller of black
ink is applied to the
entire surface. The artwork, created with a grease
crayon and set into the stone by the acid solution,
retains the black ink while the rest of the dampened
stone repels it. The stone is now ready for printing.
Chromolithography follows a similar process except
instead of one stone, several different stones comprise
a single print. With chromolithography, each section
of the image must be dissected by color. The different
colors make up the picture itself and complex prints
could require as many as twenty different stones.
A printer must know how each color will work together,
in what order they should be applied, and finally,
the print must remain in perfect registration so
that colors do not bleed onto one another.
The lithographic printing industry in the United
States grew in tandem with Tampa's cigar industry.
While Ybor City was a center of hand-rolled cigars
dependent on immigrant labor, New York was the hub
of German lithography and lithographic printing houses.
Many Germans settled in the Northeast United States,
establishing printing houses in Philadelphia, Boston,
and New York. In 1860, there were 60 lithographic
firms in the United States employing 80 people. By
1890, there were 700 lithographic printing houses,
employing 8,000 people. By 1890, the New York City
directory alone listed 130 lithographic printing
houses.
Chromolithography's ability to inject vibrant
color into everyday scenes and images made it ideal
for advertising. Color labels were affixed to
everything from peach crates to cigar boxes. According
to one historian, "cigar advertising made up
80 percent of all lithographic printing in the U.S."
People had gone, in the words of a 19th century lithographer,
"picture crazy." Without a doubt, chromolithography
became "the principle color medium for advertising"
in America, coinciding perfectly with the development
of mass-produced consumer goods.
Label Themes
Label themes vary widely. Generally
speaking, any image that might appeal to men was
printed on labels to help promote cigars. Thousands
of different labels were printed for hundreds of
factories in Ybor City, Tampa, and West Tampa depicting
everything from pretty girls to Abraham Lincoln.
Sex Appeal
For obvious reasons, sex appeal is one
of the most popular themes found in cigar art. Perhaps
nothing grabs a man's attention like a scantily
clad woman, and cigar labels are full of them. To
entice their mostly male customers, manufacturers
used sexy celebrities of the day like Julia Marlowe
and Fanny Davenport, both popular stage actresses.
Tampa Beauties, Tobacco Girl, and Miss Tampa all
feature attractive young ladies and hundreds of other
labels feature women as goddesses, angels, cowgirls,
princesses, temptresses, or housewives. Women of
cigar labels ranged from innocent or demure to sultry
or pornographic. Half-dressed women were common,
and a few early labels featured completely nude women.
Often, attractive women were only part of a label's
message. Many labels featured women, while eye-catching,
were filled with symbolic imagery. In these allegorical
labels, mechanical gears, bales of tobacco, maps,
and ships were often pictured in the background or
margins, while women dressed in flowing Roman togas
appeared in the foreground. The use of symbols and
symbolic imagery to convey deeper meaning was common
in works of art. Traditional symbols such as musical
instruments, fruit, trees, and geometric shapes like
triangles and circles have been used in Western art
since biblical times. Cigar label art is no exception.
The La Gran Via label, printed for A. Amo and Company,
is filled with several dual-layered images. A woman
standing in front of the ocean holds two laurels.
She is surrounded by eight symbolic images: a train,
a ship, a globe, wheat, tobacco, a camera, a harp,
and an artist's pallet. Why did the artist
choose these items? What do wheat and a harp have
to do with cigars or each other? The answer is that
the images are symbolic; they represent larger themes
and ideas.
The woman is shown holding two laurels commonly
associated with victory. When featured in cigar labels,
laurels probably suggest the quality of the cigar
brand. Wheat, which is on the ground next to the
woman, often denotes fertile earth or abundance,
while harps are associated with mortality and protection.
Trains, ships, and mechanical gears, all of which
are depicted in the La Gran Via label, can represent
trade, industry, or commerce, and the camera is also
likely a symbol of technological advance or progress.
The most intriguing symbols are the woman's
red hat, a symbol of revolution, and the triangle
centered just behind her head, probably a Masonic
reference. Symbolic images like these and others
such as anchors, cherubs, children, crowns, angels,
wreaths, coins, crosses, and stars are found in hundreds
of cigar labels. The greater meaning associated with
these symbols, however, is often overlooked.
Romantic Imagery
Sex appeal was one means by which
cigar manufacturers could grab the attention of their
mostly male clientele, but it wasn't the only way.
Many labels offer romanticized images of Native
Americans, nature, mythology, or nobility. Collectively,
these "Romantic" labels
depict a fictionalized version of a time, place or
person. Pirates like the one featured on the Captain
Alvarez label or the knight in armor featured on
the Ivanhoe brand conjure the romantic or heroic
ideals associated with swashbuckling pirates or "knights
in shining armor." As one author describes
it, "historical reality seldom had anything
to do with pictures on cigar labels." These
romanticized stereotypes created a fantasy world
designed to appeal to a male consumer.
Americana
Collectors often place trains, ships, maps,
famous buildings, and family scenes into separate
sub-categories. However, the use of such images constitutes
a more general theme found in cigar label art: the
celebration of American culture, or Americana.
The railroad system was revolutionizing America;
new tracks and connections were made every year.
Between 1869 and 1900, over 200,000 miles of track
was laid. It is no wonder that cigar labels celebrated
this achievement. Images of sports cars, trains and
ships appealed to consumers because they celebrated
American ingenuity, American industry, and American
culture.
Celebrity
Cigar labels may be the earliest known
use of celebrity endorsement to sell a product. Images
of writers, actors, vaudevillian performers, politicians,
generals, philosophers, judges, explorers, kings,
queens, and literary characters have all been used
to sell cigars. Collectors may also choose to subdivide
this category into writers, philosophers, or generals.
Indeed, there are so many - from Karl Marx to Charles
the Great - that the possibilities are nearly endless.
Patriotism
By 1895, the United States was readying
itself for war in Cuba. Cigar manufacturers quickly
capitalized on the nationalism and patriotism surrounding
the Spanish American War (1898-1902), using patriotic
images on their labels to sell cigars. Theodore Roosevelt's
Rough Riders, Cuban revolutionary leaders, and American
and Cuban soldiers all appeared on cigar labels in
the years just before and after the war. Little Sammies,
for example, featuring the Statue of Liberty flanked
by two twin Uncle Sams, captured the patriotic spirit
of war. The Pinar Del Rio label is another example
of a patriotic theme, though more subtly illustrated
than Little Sammies, employing previously mentioned
allegories and symbols. The label features a statuesque
Lady Liberty holding a red, white, and blue coat
of arms. She extends a laurel, apparently crowning
a young Cuban boy dressed in peasant's tattered
overalls. The boy rests his hand on a mechanical
gear while seated on a bale of tobacco. An inscription
behind them reads, "Pinar Del Rio," the
tobacco-producing region of Cuba. Through the use
of these symbolic images, this label says quite a
bit about the perceived relationship between the
United States and Cuba at the turn of the century.
Gilded
Many cigar manufacturers opted for gilded
textual labels that issued claims and guarantees.
As the techniques of gilding and embossing gained
prominence, cigar makers adorned their labels with
gold coins, or medals and awards conferred by expert
judges. Printers would brush labels with bronze leaf
or, in very rare cases with actual gold leaf, giving
the embossed image of a coin or medal a bright finish.
Lithographers referred to the process as gilding.
Textual labels could be quite simple, stating the
manufacturer and price of the cigar, or they could
make outlandish claims about the health benefits
of smoking their product. Many embossed and gilded
labels are strikingly ornate and intricate using
coins, crests, official seals and the like. Smaller
manufacturers and buckeye shops employing only a
few cigar rollers used simpler textual labels rather
than the elaborate and expensive labels used by larger
firms.
Collecting
Because they were mass-produced, cigar
labels are ignored by much of the art community.
"The general stereotype in much of the art world
is that this is not a true art form - the consequence
being that some of our finest artwork produced
by stone lithography has, until recently, been
completely overlooked." This attitude is
beginning to change. Several exhibits and books
have catalogued and studied cigar labels and advertising
art in general. Among collectors, cigar labels
are bought and sold at conventions and through
on-line auction houses like E-Bay. Some very rare
labels could garner several thousand dollars.
In Tampa, cigar labels are one way locals can connect
with the area's rich cigar history. However,
these small, colorful snapshots reveal more than
just the story of Tampa's bygone cigar era;
they capture an evolving American nation.
This article originally appeared as an exhibit
guide for "Art of the Cigar Label" produced
by the Ybor City Museum Society in cooperation with
the University Of South Florida Libraries Department
Of Special Collections. Thanks are due to David Pullen
of the University of South Florida and Thomas Vance.
Footnotes are provided upon request. Visit the
Ybor City Museum Society web site at www.ybormuseum.org
Emanuel Leto is the editor of Cigar City Magazine.
"The
Art of the Cigar Label" by Emanuel Leto appears
in Volume 1, Issue 4 of Cigar City Magazine.
