Antique 1900s - 1930s Abe Martin Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Famous Cartoon, Kin Hubbard

When Was the Last Time a Piece of Paper Made You Feel Something? 🎨

There is a moment every serious collector knows — the one where you pick up a piece of old advertising art and suddenly feel the whole world it came from. The smell of a tobacco shop on a cold Indianapolis afternoon. The rustle of a newspaper folded back to reveal a wiry, bearded Hoosier philosopher cracking wise about life on the farm. The press of a lithographer's roller laying down one careful color at a time, day after day, in some busy print shop that believed — genuinely believed — that a cigar box lid deserved to be beautiful. This Abe Martin embossed cigar label is exactly that moment, preserved in ink and gold on heavy paper stock, as vivid and alive today as the day it came off the press.

I have handled a great many antique advertising pieces over the years, and I will tell you plainly: cigar labels from this era are among the most breathtaking examples of American commercial art ever produced. This one, in particular, carries a story so rich — so woven into Indiana folklore, national humor, political history, and the lost craft of chromolithography — that I almost feel guilty putting it up for sale rather than framing it myself. Almost.

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🏷️ What This Piece Is

This is an original antique embossed chromolithograph inner cigar box label for the Abe Martin brand, manufactured by the Burdena Cigar Factory of Indianapolis, Indiana. It measures approximately 8½ × 6½ inches — a generous, substantial sheet printed on heavy paper stock, the kind of weight that kept these labels vivid and structurally sound through decades of storage. The label is New Old Stock (NOS) — warehouse-fresh factory overstock that was never applied to a cigar box, gathered up from old cigar factory stock in the 1970s and 1980s before it could be lost forever. That is the only reason pieces like this survive in the condition they do.

The printing process is embossed chromolithography with gold accent work — and what gold work it is. At center, a raised oval medallion frames the instantly recognizable figure of Abe Martin himself: a bearded, pipe-smoking man in a battered brown hat, holding a red cap, rendered in warm browns, golds, tans, and cream.

The words BY GINGER arc across the medallion — Abe's signature exclamation, the phrase that made him a national catchword, the same phrase that sold a million cigars. Flanking the central portrait, two farm scenes unfold in exquisite miniature: a winter landscape at left showing a lone figure outside a snow-covered Martin's Farm, a dog bounding through drifts, a white goose stepping through the foreground; and at right, a summer scene in full green leaf, the same figure rendered in warm afternoon light, a long rifle in hand, a bull grazing near a fence.

Above it all, ABE MARTIN arches in bold red embossed lettering with a dotted gold border, and the name repeats again at the bottom of the outer label sheet in the same striking red. The reverse of the uncut label sheet shows the full embossed impression in reverse — proof positive of the physical depth of the printing craft, and one of the most fascinating things about handling these labels in person.

Most cigar manufacturers at this time used real gold flakes in the embossing process. That is not a figure of speech or a marketing claim — it is a documented practice of the American chromolithography trade during its peak decades. The warmth and depth you see in the gold accents on this label comes from actual metallic material pressed into the paper under tremendous pressure. Modern printing cannot replicate this. It has never been replicated. It is, quite simply, a lost art.

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🏭 The Craft — Chromolithography and the Golden Age of Cigar Label Art

To understand why collectors, museums, and art institutes seek out pieces like this one, you have to understand what chromolithography actually was — and what it meant to be a lithographic artist working on cigar labels in America between roughly 1880 and 1930.

Chromolithography is a color printing process in which each individual color is drawn separately onto a stone or metal plate, then printed in careful registration, layer by layer, to build up a full-color image. A complex label like this Abe Martin piece might require a dozen or more separate passes through the press — each color planned, drawn, and printed by hand, by a skilled artist who had to envision the finished image in reverse, in layers, one tone at a time. The embossing step came separately, pressing the dried printed sheet against a die to raise the design in three-dimensional relief. The gold work came separately again. These were not quick jobs. They were labors of craft and artistry that took genuine talent.

Here is the part of the story that moves me every time I think about it: the vast majority of those artists remain unknown. They were extraordinarily skilled — trained draftsmen, colorists, and designers who could produce commercial art of a quality that puts most modern graphic design to shame — and they were desperate for work, paid modest wages, and received no byline, no credit, no recognition. Their names did not appear on the labels. Their work was considered industrial output, not fine art. And yet here we are, a century later, with museums dedicating entire gallery wings to cigar label chromolithography, and collectors paying serious money to preserve what those anonymous artists created. I think about that every time I handle one of these pieces. We are the ones keeping their art alive. That matters.

Indianapolis was, in this era, a genuine cigar manufacturing city. During the 1880s, cigar manufacturing became big business in the Indiana capital, with more than 90 different cigar factories operating in the city at peak. During the governorship of Thomas Marshall — whose name we will get to in a moment — there were more than 30 local cigar factories producing five-cent cigars, including some of the oldest and largest manufacturers in the region. The Burdena Cigar Factory was one of those Indianapolis houses, and it held something most of its competitors did not: a licensing agreement with the most beloved cartoon character in the Midwest.

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🖊️ The Man Behind the Character — Kin Hubbard and Abe Martin

Frank McKinney Hubbard — always called Kin — was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, on September 1, 1868. He came to Indianapolis as a young man, joined The Indianapolis News, and on a December day in 1904 introduced to the paper's back page a scrawny, bearded, pipe-smoking Hoosier philosopher named Abe Martin of Brown County, Indiana. The strip ran six days a week for twenty-six years, appearing in syndication in as many as 300 American newspapers by the height of its popularity. Will Rogers — Will Rogers, who knew funny — called Kin Hubbard "America's greatest humorist." That is not a small thing to say, and Rogers was not a man given to empty flattery.

Abe Martin was not a plot-driven strip. It was a character study and a vehicle for aphorisms — short, dry, vernacular observations about American life, politics, small-town society, and human folly that cut with a precision most editorial writers could only envy. The character himself was rooted in a specific place: Hubbard made Brown County, Indiana, the cartographic home of Abe Martin, and filled it with neighbors, signs, and seasonal scenery drawn straight from the Indiana countryside. Look at this label and you see exactly that world: Martin's Farm in winter snow, Martin's Farm in summer green, the same stubborn Hoosier figure standing in both, pipe in mouth, regarding the world with cheerful skepticism. The artist who painted this label clearly knew the strip.

Kin Hubbard died on December 26, 1930, at the age of 62, from heart disease. The state of Indiana did not forget him. In 1932, Brown County State Park named both a ridge and its famous lodge in his honor — Kin Hubbard Ridge and Abe Martin Lodge — and the lodge's twenty cabins were each named after characters from the Abe Martin cartoons. That lodge still stands. Visitors still sleep in cabins named for the neighbors Hubbard invented. The character outlived the man who drew him, and it outlives him still.

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🗣️ "By Ginger!" — The Phrase, the Vice President, and the Five-Cent Cigar

Here is where the history gets genuinely remarkable — and where this label's central text, BY GINGER, earns its place in American political and popular culture lore.

Thomas R. Marshall served as Indiana's governor and then as Woodrow Wilson's Vice President, and he is remembered today almost exclusively for one remark: "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar." It became one of the most quoted lines in American political history, attached to Marshall permanently, repeated in newspapers and speeches for generations. The problem — and the delicious irony — is that the line was not originally Marshall's at all.

The quip traced back to Kin Hubbard, who had put those very words in the mouth of Abe Martin. Marshall, who was a genuine fan of the Abe Martin comic strip, simply picked up the phrase and made it his own in public remarks, and the press ran with it as a Marshall original. After Marshall's death in 1925, the true authorship began to surface — and Hubbard, characteristically, got the last word. He licensed the Abe Martin character to the Burdena Cigar Factory in Indianapolis, which began manufacturing the five-cent Abe Martin cigar, and the label's slogan — "By Ginger!" exclaimed Abe. "It's good." — tied the whole story together in one elegant loop. The phrase "By Ginger!" was Abe Martin's own signature exclamation throughout the strip, his mild oath of emphasis, his Hoosier substitute for stronger language. It is the phrase on this very label.

Local legend in Brown County has it that Hubbard himself approved the label design, that he had strong opinions about how Abe Martin should look in print, and that the bearded, hat-wearing, pipe-smoking figure on this very label reflects Hubbard's own carefully maintained vision of his character's appearance. Whether or not Hubbard sat across a table from the lithographer who designed this piece, the rendering is faithful to the strip in every particular — the hat, the beard, the pipe, the slightly hunched and skeptical posture of a man who has seen enough of the world to find it gently absurd.

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📅 Dating This Label and Its Place in the Story

The Abe Martin cigar label story spans roughly two decades. Earlier variants exist — there is a documented Abe Martin Gold Miner cigar box label from the 1910s, a different visual take on the character, measuring 6.5 × 8.5 inches and depicting Abe in fancier frontier dress. The embossed and bronzed style of the label you are looking at here — with its sophisticated gold accent work, its paired seasonal vignettes, and its refined oval medallion composition — is consistent with the 1930s production dating that multiple dealers have documented for this label variant. That places it in the final chapter of the character's active newspaper run, in the years immediately following Kin Hubbard's death in 1930, when the strip continued briefly in syndication before its final appearance in 1937.

The heavy paper stock, the depth of the embossing, and the vibrancy of the chromolithographic colors are all characteristic of the best commercial label printing of that period. This was also, as the seller has noted, very close to the end of this art form's golden age. After the 1920s and into the 1930s, the economics of printing shifted, offset lithography displaced the old stone-and-plate processes, and the kind of painstaking, multi-pass, embossed-and-gilded label work you see here became increasingly rare and then essentially vanished. What you are holding is late-period work from a craft that was already passing into history.

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🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🏡 Frame it as Americana wall art — the oval portrait format and warm color palette work beautifully in a study, den, home library, or living room; it reads as fine illustration, not mere advertising ephemera.
• 🍂 Seasonal farmhouse display — the paired winter and summer farm scenes make this an especially evocative piece for a farmhouse-style interior or a room decorated around the rhythms of rural life.
• 📰 Hubbard / Brown County Indiana tribute grouping — pair with vintage Indianapolis News pages carrying Abe Martin strips, a period Indiana map, or Brown County State Park memorabilia for a focused regional history display.
• 🎩 Vintage tobacco and advertising collection centerpiece — as a named-character label with documented literary and political history, this sits at the top tier of cigar advertising collectibles; it anchors any antique advertising collection.
• 🖼️ Gallery-style exhibition framing — mat it in period-appropriate cream or gold and display it the way museum curators display chromolithographic commercial art: as the fine art it genuinely is.
• 🎁 Gift for an Indiana history enthusiast, Kin Hubbard admirer, or political history collector — this is a piece with a documented place in American literary and political lore; it carries meaning beyond its visual beauty.

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🎁 Who Collects These — and Why the Window Is Closing

Antique cigar label collectors are a passionate and knowledgeable group, and they have been ahead of the broader market for decades. Museums and art institutes have maintained dedicated gallery collections of chromolithographic cigar labels since at least the mid-twentieth century, recognizing them as significant examples of American commercial art history. Private collectors followed, and in recent decades the wider antique advertising market has caught up — driven by a growing appreciation for the craft of pre-offset printing, the nostalgia of early American brand culture, and the simple visual pleasure of these extraordinary objects.

Beyond the pure advertising collector, the Abe Martin label draws from several distinct collector communities simultaneously: Indiana and Brown County regional history collectors, Kin Hubbard and American humor historians, political Americana collectors (for the Marshall/five-cent-cigar connection), antique tobacco and cigar memorabilia collectors, and chromolithography and printing history enthusiasts. That breadth of appeal is unusual for a single piece and speaks to how much genuine history this label carries.

The supply of authentic NOS cigar labels is genuinely finite. The warehouse finds of the 1970s and 1980s — those caches of never-used factory overstock that were rescued before they could be discarded or destroyed — have largely been absorbed into collections, galleries, and the market. New discoveries happen, but they are increasingly rare. Once the existing supply of original pieces is in frames and display cases, authentic examples of this quality and documented provenance will become very difficult to find. I have watched this happen across multiple categories of antique advertising art during my years in this business. The time to collect is always before the scarcity becomes obvious.

And consider this: the anonymous lithographic artist who designed this label — who planned its colors, drew its figures, rendered those exquisite miniature farm scenes, and pressed gold into heavy paper stock so that a bearded Hoosier philosopher could sell five-cent cigars in Indianapolis — never signed his work and almost certainly died without recognition. Collecting and preserving pieces like this one is the only form of credit he will ever receive. That feels like reason enough to me.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Is this an original antique label or a reproduction?

This is a genuine original antique chromolithograph label, not a reproduction, not an art print, and not a color copy. It is New Old Stock — meaning it was produced in the 1930s, stored as factory overstock, and never applied to a cigar box. The embossing is physical and three-dimensional, the gold accents are genuine metallic work consistent with period production practices, and the paper stock is the heavy-weight commercial printing stock characteristic of the era. The reverse of the sheet shows the full embossed impression in mirror image, which is one of the clearest ways to verify that you are looking at an original embossed chromolithograph rather than a later flat reproduction. Reproductions cannot replicate the physical depth of true embossing.

What exactly does "New Old Stock" mean for a piece like this?

New Old Stock — NOS — means that this label was printed in the 1930s for use on Abe Martin cigar boxes at the Burdena Cigar Factory in Indianapolis, but was never actually applied to a box. It remained in storage as factory overstock. Many surviving examples of antique cigar labels come from exactly this source: in the 1970s and 1980s, collectors and dealers recognized that old cigar factory warehouses contained caches of unused labels and moved to rescue them before they were discarded. That is the provenance story for labels of this type. Because they were never used — never glued down, never exposed to the interior of a box — they retain the full visual integrity of their original printing.

What does "BY GINGER" mean on the label?

"By Ginger!" was Abe Martin's signature exclamation throughout Kin Hubbard's newspaper comic strip — a mild, folksy Hoosier oath of emphasis, the kind of thing a man says when he wants to make a point without resorting to actual profanity. It became one of the character's most recognizable verbal tics, known to readers across the 300+ newspapers that carried the strip in syndication. The full advertising slogan for the cigar, consistent with the spirit of the label, was "By Ginger!" exclaimed Abe. "It's good." The phrase also carries an indirect echo of the famous "good five-cent cigar" line that Kin Hubbard's Abe Martin had originated and Vice President Thomas Marshall had made famous — making the exclamation on this label a knowing wink at an inside joke that every newspaper reader of the era would have understood immediately.

What are the dimensions, and how should I frame it?

The label measures approximately 8½ × 6½ inches — a generous size that displays beautifully at human scale. For framing, I recommend a mat that gives the piece room to breathe: a cream or warm ivory mat in a period-appropriate width, with a simple gold or dark wood frame, will honor both the color palette of the label and its chromolithographic craft. Because the embossing is a significant part of what makes this piece special, avoid pressing the label surface directly against glass — a mat that creates standoff distance allows the three-dimensional quality of the embossing to remain visible at an angle. Many collectors choose UV-protective glazing to preserve the color vibrancy of original chromolithographs for future generations.

Why do collectors say this printing process "can't be reproduced today"?

This is not hyperbole — it is a straightforward fact about the economics and craft of printing history. True stone and plate chromolithography, as practiced in American commercial printing from roughly the 1860s through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, required hand-drawn color separations, skilled pressmen, careful multi-pass registration, and — for embossed labels — separately tooled dies and physical pressing operations. The entire process was labor-intensive to a degree that became economically unviable as offset lithography, photographic reproduction, and mechanical color separation took over the industry. The craft knowledge, the tooling, and the trained workforce all dissipated. Contemporary printers can produce technically impressive color work, but the specific visual character of embossed chromolithography — the layered translucency of the colors, the physical depth of the embossing, the warmth of real metallic gold work — comes from a process that is genuinely gone. That is why museums treat these labels as fine art objects.

Is there a connection between this label and Brown County, Indiana?

Yes, and it is a direct one. Kin Hubbard set the Abe Martin strip in Brown County, Indiana, beginning in 1905, and the character became so associated with the region that Brown County effectively adopted him as a local icon. The farm scenes on this label — the snow-covered Martin's Farm at left, the green-hillside Martin's Farm at right — reflect the specific Indiana landscape Hubbard drew from throughout the strip's run. After Hubbard's death in 1930, Brown County State Park named Kin Hubbard Ridge and Abe Martin Lodge in his honor, with the lodge's cabins named for Abe Martin strip characters. The lodge still operates today. For Brown County and Indiana regional history collectors, this label is a direct material artifact of that cultural legacy — printed in Indianapolis, rooted in Brown County, and carrying the imagery of the Indiana countryside that made Abe Martin a national figure.

How rare is this specific label variant?

Multiple Abe Martin cigar label designs were produced across the brand's roughly two-decade run, from the 1910s Gold Miner variant through the 1930s embossed style represented by this piece. Each variant exists in limited surviving quantities, and the embossed-and-bronzed 1930s design — with its paired seasonal farm vignettes, central oval portrait, and gold accent work — is among the more visually sophisticated of the known examples. Because the supply of authentic NOS labels from original factory stock is genuinely finite, and because the Abe Martin brand carries documented appeal to multiple distinct collector communities simultaneously, this is not a label you are likely to encounter regularly in the marketplace. The pieces that do surface tend to move to collections and stay there.