Sometimes the object that catches me is not the thing that was sold, but the thing it was sold in. These cigar labels were made to be fixed to boxes, read at a glance and, I suppose, discarded without a second thought once the box had done its work. Seen now, without their boxes, they seem to have escaped that instruction. The product has gone; the picture, the colour and the promise have stayed.
What I like about them is their lack of apology. Each label asks a great deal of a small piece of paper. There must be a name to remember, an image to enter the eye, enough ornament to make it feel special, and lettering that holds together at the distance of a shop counter. The result is advertising, certainly, but it is advertising made with the concentration of a miniature poster.
A little world at the edge of the sea
The Holly Beach Yacht Club label was the first one that made me stop. A yacht heads across a calm-looking sea, framed by clouds, gilded ornament and the large name above it. The title does not tell us much about a real yacht club, and I would not want to manufacture a history for it from the picture alone. But it tells us exactly what sort of place the purchaser was being invited to imagine: salt air, movement, membership and a little leisure made visible in colour.
At the lower edge is a detail I enjoy as much as the sailboat: The Moehle Litho Co., Brooklyn, N.Y. The printer’s name is small, but it makes the label feel less like a floating image and more like a made thing. Someone drew it, prepared it for print, chose how the colours and raised details should work together, and put that name discreetly into the border. It is a useful reminder that the maker of the picture could be as important to the finished object as the name of the cigar.
What a raised line can do
The second label, Prince of India, is dated in its own printing: “Copyright 1894, Geo. S. Harris & Sons, N.Y.” It combines a central figure in a red fez with a dense surround of red, gold and black. In a flat photograph it is handsome; in the hand, the raised lettering and ornament are the part that changes it. Catching the light, they give the printed surface a slight physical insistence. The label does not simply show a product name. It asks to be handled, tilted and looked at twice.
“Copyright 1894, Geo. S. Harris & Sons, N.Y.”
That line is worth pausing over because it is evidence one can actually read, rather than a date guessed from style. The broader world around it is less tidy. These labels often borrowed theatrical, exoticising or aspirational imagery in order to create an instant mood. The Prince of India is a good example: a carefully staged identity on a label, designed to make the name feel larger, older and more worldly than the box beneath it. It is effective, but it also belongs to a period in which advertising was entirely comfortable with turning distant cultures into decoration.
A name in lights
The Julian Eltinge label has a different kind of confidence. Rather than a landscape or an invented world, it gives us a face, a name and a frame which looks almost like a proscenium. The listing dates it to about 1910 and identifies Eltinge as a vaudeville performer. I find that association convincing as an explanation of the design’s mood, but I prefer to keep the label itself at the centre: a portrait held within red-and-gold ornament, made to turn a name into an event.
It is the sort of item that explains why I do not think of old labels as merely decorative scraps. The maker is using a performer’s public image as a piece of packaging, and doing it with a visual vocabulary shared by theatre programmes, posters and shop-window displays. The box became a small stage. Even when the paper has toned and the edges have softened, the arrangement still knows where it wants your eye to go.
Looking past the name
When I come across these labels, I begin with the image, but I try not to stop there. The small printer’s line, a copyright date, a register mark, the survival of embossing, the edge where the paper was cut or mounted: these are the parts that make a generic image into a particular object. They also make condition matter in an intelligent way. A little age can be part of the story; a missing corner can remove the very printer’s line or border which explains how the thing was made.
There is a wider reason to look carefully, too. The Library of Congress holds hundreds of cigar-label proof prints, including work by the American Lithographic Company and Schmidt & Co. The Smithsonian’s business-history collections likewise catalogue cigar labels as lithographs and preserve work connected with Geo. S. Harris & Sons. Those collections do not identify these three labels for us. They do, however, place them within a serious printed tradition: commercial work made at scale, where illustration, lettering and the surface of the paper were all expected to sell an idea.
What survived the box
I think these are overlooked because they are so small and because their original purpose was so practical. That is exactly why they deserve attention. A book plate expects to be noticed; a label had only a moment to do its work. It had to make a modest object feel desirable before the buyer knew anything about what was inside. The yacht-club scene, the 1894 copyright and the stage-like portrait are three different answers to the same problem.
Long after the cigars have vanished, those answers remain surprisingly vivid. The surviving imagery still sells the yacht-club fantasy, the exoticised identity of Prince of India and the theatrical fame of Julian Eltinge. That is enough to make me look again.
Bibliographical note
This editorial is based on original labels currently listed by RUSTY PECHA: the Holly Beach Yacht Club label, the dated Prince of India label, and the Julian Eltinge label. Dates and named associations are stated only where printed on the label or supplied by the corresponding listing; the visual reading is my own.
For context, the Library of Congress catalogues a collection of American cigar-label proof prints, while the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History lists cigar labels, including material connected with Geo. S. Harris & Sons, within its tobacco and business-americana collections. These sources give useful context for the trade; they are not offered as identifications of these individual labels.