The Stogies May Be Long Gone, but Their Labels Are Still Smokin’
More than a century ago, the nation was engulfed in cigar mania, as an estimated 1.5 million cigar brands competed for shelf space in tobacco shops and general stores across the U.S. This stogie madness led to the production of one of the earliest forms of point-of-sale advertising--the ornately decorated cigar-box label.
Today, the same images that once drew customers to a particular cigar brand are a budding niche of the multibillion-dollar U.S. collectibles market. Sought by a select but growing few across the country--it’s estimated that 500 to 1,000 hard-core enthusiasts exist nationwide--some individual labels are on the auction block with asking prices rivaling the cost of a small home in Beverly Hills.
“The appreciation rate has been mind-boggling, and that is a gamble I am willing to take,” said John Brittle, a collector in Nashville who owns between 350 and 500 antique cigar-box labels and says they have risen in value an average of 300%. “But if the floor falls out of this thing, I will always have the image. Heck, I’ll wallpaper my house with them.”
To many, these antique labels are not merely a footnote in advertising history but the finest color printings ever, because the labels are labor-intensive works designed by artisans who used a now-extinct, stone-based form of lithography and a 13-color process.
It is said that it took up to 12 men a month to produce a set of the labels after a drawing was made as a prototype. Artists used a wet limestone surface to etch and paint a label, often using up to 13 colors to create a wide spectrum of rich hues. Most modern-day printing processes use only four colors.
Produced between 1870 and the mid-1920s, the labels reflected the culture of the time as cigar manufacturers tried anything and everything to attract smokers. What resulted were exquisitely designed and painted labels--some were even adorned with real gold dust--depicting a panorama of images including American sports icons, semi-nude women, smoking cowboys and a new mode of transportation called the automobile.
During this cigar heyday, local smoke shops would line their shelves with open cigar boxes. It soon became axiomatic that with this type of product display, the more eye-catching the image on the open lid, the more likely a customer would be enticed to buy.
“About 100 years ago, there were hundreds and hundreds of makers of cigars,” said Kyle Huesfloen, managing editor of Antique Trader magazine. “So there are many varieties of labels, and new ones are showing up all the time.”
California is known as a hotbed of these hard-to-find pieces of Americana. Collectors estimate that three-quarters of all labels can be found in California and about 80% of those in Southern California.
Ed Barnes, editor of Cigar Label Gazette, is capitalizing on the labels’ nascent popularity. Entering his fifth year of producing the newsletter in his Lake Forest home, he has watched his subscriber base flourish.
Having started in 1995 with about 60 subscribers, Barnes now sends out about 240 copies of the Gazette, hoping to draw more collectors into the world of labels.
A label enthusiast himself, Barnes sees a link between the growing economy and growing label prices.
“All collectibles could be hurt with a dive in the economy,” he admitted, “but I don’t see an end in sight.”
Indeed, all categories of tobacciana have become more collectible during the last few years, Huesfloen said.
The recent politicizing of tobacco, he said, has also led to a sharp rise in the collecting of antiques associated with it.
The flourishing of the Internet, which has made buying, selling and trading as easy as a click of a mouse, has also helped pique curiosity in this little-known area of collecting, which makes up less than 1% of the $2-billion U.S. collectibles market.
“The labels have only become of interest over the past 20 years, but in just the past five years, it has really started to take off,” said Nick Buzolich, vice president of the cigar collectors section of Collector’s Universe, an online auction house.
Buzolich predicts that labels selling for $200 and $1,000 today could hit $1,000 and $10,000, respectively, within the next several years.
The set of labels believed to be the most valuable on the market today does not even depict cigars, but features Hall of Fame baseball player Honus Wagner, who signed his first contract in 1895. The four labels, owned by an Ohio collector, currently have an asking price of $500,000. (An equally rare Wagner baseball card recently sold at auction for $225,000.)
Wayne Dunn of Mission Viejo, who owns thousands of labels and several stones from which their images were made, has made his buying, trading and writing about the rare collectibles a full-time job.
“Once we sell one to someone, they very rarely stop at buying just one,” said Dunn, who publishes a yearly price guide to the labels market. “It’s addictive; you get hooked.”
The overwhelming sentiment of the most vocal label collectors is that the hobby is still a hobby, but a hobby that may also pay off big.
“There are contemporary collectibles that are produced and called a ‘limited edition,’ ” said Sid Emerson of Escondido, Calif., one of the biggest label dealers in the U.S. “These labels are natural limited editions--no more can ever be made. It is an innocent, pure collectible. The scarcity is built in.”