Antique Manila Blunts Cigar Band 🚬 Gilt Gold Embossed Tobacco Label NOS Early 1900s

Who Smoked Manila Blunts? 🚬 Manila Blunts Gilt Cigar Band, MADE IN U.S.A.

Size: 2 3/4" x 1/2" ~ New Old Stock (NOS)

This little Manila Blunts cigar band is a flat, unused band that never went around a cigar. MANILA BLUNTS is printed in cream letters on a deep maroon panel in the middle, with gold speed lines streaking out to each side and MADE IN U.S.A. on both wings, all on a bright gold embossed ground with a dotted border pressed into the paper. One end is a plain white tab, where the cigar roller put the dab of glue. Turn it over and you can see the whole embossing die from the back, every little raised dot of the border.

🗺️ The Manila Name

The word Manila on a cigar was never an accident. Tobacco from around Manila carried real romance in the Western market, and trade lore holds that at the turn of the twentieth century fine Manila leaf was spoken of in the same breath as Cuban, with old-timers still telling the story that it sometimes fetched more than its Caribbean rival. A brand called Manila Blunts was reaching straight for that.

The best-known Manila cigar house was the Alhambra Cigar & Cigarette Manufacturing Company, which traced its beginnings to the late 1800s and set up its plant and offices on Tayuman Street in the Tondo district of Manila in 1912. Alhambra's hand-rolled cigars were at their most popular in the first three decades of the twentieth century and sold at home and abroad. The corporation wound up in 1962, and a new company, Alhambra Industries, Inc., was formed to handle its business, and it was Alhambra Industries that filed MANILA BLUNTS as a trademark for cigars in November 1961. This band, though, says MADE IN U.S.A. on both ends, so it was printed to go around a cigar made right here, borrowing the island name.

✨ Gold on a Throwaway Ring

Look closely and you can read the craft in it. The band was printed on a gold ground and then run under a steel die that pressed the dotted border and panels up into relief. The shine on bands and labels like this came from 22-karat gold or bronze leaf, and on American work it was generally bronze. It is a lot of trouble to go to for something a smoker would slip off and drop in the ashtray, and that is the whole point: the band was the cigar's first advertisement.

📚 Cigar Band Legends and Vitolphilia

Nobody agrees on where the cigar band came from, and the legends are half the fun. One story says Catherine the Great of Russia had her cigars wrapped in silk so they would not stain her fingers, and her court copied her. Another says paper bands were put on cigars shipped to England to keep gentlemen's white gloves clean. The historians give the credit to a Dutch-born cigar maker in Cuba named Gustave Bock, who in the 1830s put paper rings with his signature on every cigar he exported to Europe, and within about twenty years nearly every Havana cigar going abroad wore one.

By 1900 an estimated four out of five American men smoked cigars, and something like 2 billion cigar bands were sold in the United States that year alone. Kids collected them, scrapbookers turned them into collage art, and some cigar makers even used their bands like trading stamps, with catalogs of premiums you could get for a few hundred or a few thousand bands. Collecting them has a name, vitolphilia, and the record holder, American collector Joe Hruby, was in the Guinness Book of World Records with more than 165,000 different bands, a number that had passed 221,000 by 1999.

🖼️ Display

Float-mount it between glass so the gold catches the light and the embossing throws its own little shadow, or build a small framed grid of cigar bands and let this one sit in the middle. It is a fun gift for a cigar smoker, a tobacciana collector or anybody who loves old paper.