Antique Lucky Bill 🍀 Gold Embossed Cigar Box Back Flap Label NOS 1900s Green Red Victorian

Lucky Bill in Gold? 🍀 Antique 1900s Gold Embossed Cigar Box Back Flap Label, NOS

Size: 4" x 2"

🍀 Lucky Bill, in gold

A little gold-embossed cigar box label that never went on a box. LUCKY BILL is the only word on it, and it doesn't need any more: red and gold letters, laurel sprays, a shield with a star, all pressed up off the paper so the gold catches the light.

🔍 What's on it

An antique die-cut back-flap label from the early 1900s, 4" x 2", New Old Stock. LUCKY BILL runs across the top in fancy red letters outlined and shaded in gold, over a soft pale green ground. Under it, gold laurel sprays reach out from both sides of a red shield with a gold star inside a wreath, topped with a little crest. A gold rope-and-scallop border runs all the way around, the bottom edge is die-cut in curves, and a plain cream strip runs along the straight top edge. Flip it over and the back is plain, with the whole design pressed through in mirror image, which is how you can tell it was really embossed and not just printed to look that way.

🚬 Cigar box labels

Back when America smoked cigars by the billions, every box carried a whole set of paper: the big inner lid label, the outer label, the edge strips and a small flap label like this one. The fancier brands had them embossed and gilded, printed on stone presses in color after color, so a box on the tobacconist's counter looked like a little treasure chest. And there were an awful lot of boxes to dress. By 1900 this country had more than 27,000 cigar factories, packed tightest in Manhattan and spread out from Tampa's clear Havana houses to Milwaukee and the shops of York County, Pennsylvania, which alone counted about 1,200 of them by 1907. Americans bought something like six billion taxed cigars in 1901. Label houses like George Schlegel in New York, at it since 1849, and Geo. S. Harris & Sons in Philadelphia made their names printing for them. That same year of 1900, tobacco farmers in Windsor, Connecticut, stretched hand-woven cloth over half an acre on River Street in Poquonock to grow a thin wrapper leaf that could stand up to the imported Sumatra, and that was the start of Connecticut shade. Lucky names were everywhere in the tobacco trade, a lucky charm and a good smoke for the working man at the end of the day. The most famous of them all started out in Richmond, Virginia: R.A. Patterson brought out Lucky Strike in 1871 as a cut plug chewing tobacco, and the American Tobacco Company bought it in 1905, a dozen years before its "It's Toasted" ads. Lucky Bill fits right in with that crowd.

Most of these labels were glued down and thrown out with the box. The clean, flat ones that survive, like this, came out of old printer's stock and were never used.

🖼️ Display

It looks wonderful framed small with a cream or green mat so the embossed gold has room to shine, or in a shadow box with a few cigar bands and an old matchbook. If you'd rather keep it in a sleeve, go with polyester or polypropylene and skip the PVC kind, because PVC gives off hydrochloric acid as it breaks down, and that's no friend to old paper. A great little gift for a cigar smoker or anyone who likes old advertising.