Antique 1930s Tebson Embossed Cigar Label Woodgrain 🚬 Brooks & Co's, Red Lion, PA

Who Was Tebson? Nobody - and That's the Fun Part 🚬 An Antique Brooks & Co's Tebson Perfecto De Luxe Embossed Cigar Label, Red Lion, Pennsylvania

Size: 9" x 7"

A faux-woodgrain ground made to look like the cigar box itself, and on it a gold-and-black arched emblem: BROOKS & CO'S, EXCEPTIONAL, TEBSON, QUALITY, VERY MILD, PERFECTO DE LUXE, with ribbons for TEBSON PERFECTO and TEBSON DE LUXE down the sides and two gold medallions carrying an intertwined monogram. At the bottom: NONE GENUINE WITHOUT THIS SIGNATURE over a written T. E. Brooks & Co., and Title & Design Registered. It's deeply embossed and gilded, never put on a box.

Tebson is made out of the founder's own initials - T. E. B., for T. E. Brooks - turned into a name that sounds like a gentleman you'd trust with your smoke. Brooks put it on a whole family of cigars, plain Tebson, Tebson Invincibles and this Perfecto De Luxe among them, and the same firm had Canadian Club on its books as early as 1894 and Have A Sweet as late as 1941. There isn't a ton of the Perfecto De Luxe left out there - you mostly see the other Tebson labels.

🏭 Red Lion, the cigar town

Red Lion, down in York County, Pennsylvania, was nothing much until the railroad put a depot there in 1874. Not long after, a man named Neiman started rolling cigars in his basement - the first cigar factory in the borough - and in 1880 there was still just the one, with three or four people. Then it took off. Around the turn of the century T. E. Brooks was one of the officers, with D. A. Horn, Fred Smith and the senior partner Sechrist, of the Porto Rico Cigar Company on the Square, in a building that's now the Red Lion borough offices; that firm was dissolved in 1912, and Brooks built his own.

By 1920 Red Lion had so much cigar business that York County kept two tax offices, one for the county and one just for Red Lion, and by 1927 the town made a fifth of all the nickel cigars in America. A tobacco man there counted 109 cigar factories in 1927, most of them just a man, his wife and their kids, with children stripping leaf at home and banding cigars after school, and more women than men at the tables. A woman who worked there remembered the First World War as the boom: soldiers smoked a lot, they couldn't make enough cigars, and that's when T. E. Brooks and all those big fellows made their money. After the war, the cigarette started taking over. The local lore runs deep: old-timers remember a town where the smell of tobacco leaf was simply the smell of the air, and the rolling tables never really stopped.

Red Lion still remembers. The street where the factories stood is still called Cigar Row, and the town still celebrates New Year's Eve, last I knew, by raising a big cigar at midnight instead of dropping a ball. Folks there will also tell you Red Lion once had more millionaires per head than any town in the country, and that it rolled something like a tenth of all the cigars in the United States - the kind of thing a cigar town says about itself, and it may well be true. Little neat facts like these make the hours of digging worthwhile to me.

📅 How old is it?

There's no date printed on it, but the label dates itself. Look right under the signature: Title & Design Registered. The design it means - that whole arched emblem with EXCEPTIONAL and QUALITY wrapped around the name, between the two T. E. B. monogram medallions - was registered with the U.S. Patent Office by T. E. Brooks of Red Lion as a trademark for cigars. He first used it on May 13, 1932, filed that June, and it was registered on September 27, 1932, as No. 297,685. A label that says the design is registered was printed after that, so this one belongs to the 1930s, the Depression years, when Red Lion was still rolling nickel cigars by the million. Brooks kept right on going, too - the firm had Have A Sweet on its books by 1941.

🎨 The craft

Embossed, gilded, and printed to look like wood - this is cigar label work at its fanciest, every color and the gold on its own pass and then pressed so hard you can feel the monograms from the back. Most of these artists were very good but desperate for work during that era, got paid very little and received no recognition for their work. Unfortunately, the majority of these artists will remain unknown, but we can keep their art alive forever.

🚬 About these labels

Every one I have is unused, 9 by 7 inches. It's a great one framed in a den or a cigar room, or for anybody from York County. The supply is finite - nobody makes labels like this anymore, and once these last unused ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.