Antique 1920s Big Wolf Cigar Label 🚬 Gold Embossed Chromolithograph, James W. Smith Cigar Co., Snarling Wolf Head Die-Cut Label, NOS

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? 🐺 An Antique Big Wolf Gold-Embossed Cigar Box Label, James W. Smith Cigar Co.

Size: 4 1/2" x 4 1/2"

What kind of cigar needed a wolf on the box to sell itself? This one. BIG WOLF arches across the top in gold-outlined letters over a huge snarling wolf's head, fangs out, with gold scrollwork in the bottom corners and a gold rule around the whole square, clipped at the corners. Along the bottom margin, in small capitals: TITLE AND DESIGN OWNED BY THE JAMES W. SMITH CIGAR CO. Turn it over and the back is blank, with the whole design pushed through in reverse where the embossing die struck it. Every one I have is unused, never pasted to a box.

Dealers who've handled the other pieces of this brand family describe the art plainly as the big bad wolf of storybook lore, and looking at it, it's hard to argue. On a tobacco counter crowded with eagles, generals, prizefighters and pretty girls, a wolf with his teeth bared was going to get noticed.

📜 Title and design owned by

That little line at the foot is the cigar maker staking its claim. A cigar company could buy stock art from a lithographer that anybody else could buy too, or it could own its brand outright, so no other factory could put this wolf on a box. James W. Smith owned this one. The firm had other brands as well - an Edmund Halley cigar label was published around 1910 for the James W. Smith Cigar Co. by Benjamin J. Kane of Philadelphia. Where the company itself stood, the label doesn't say.

And the same wolf turns up in other dress. A square label of this exact art exists with a different owner line, TITLE & DESIGN REGISTERED BY S.P. MFG. CO., CINCINNATI, O., so the wolf worked for more than one master. There's an oval version, small tags for the box edges, a gold wolf's head in a wreath for the top sheet, and a big 10 by 6 inch inner-lid label with the same James W. Smith line, HIGH GRADE BIG WOLF HAND MADE, and two 5 cent medallions - so Big Wolf was a hand-made nickel cigar. In 1914 Vice President Thomas Marshall, presiding over a long Senate speech about what this country needs, leaned over and said what this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar - and thousands of brands like this one were fighting to be it.

✨ The gold

The gold is what you notice first, and it was the expensive part. A label like this went through the press once for every color, and then the embossing die came down to raise the letters and the wolf's snout and ears up off the paper - you can feel the ridges with a fingertip. Cigar makers paid for it because the box did half the selling, sitting open on the counter with the label staring up at the customer. The trade puts this Big Wolf family in the 1910s and 1920s, when a good nickel cigar and a fancy box were the whole game.

🐺 About these

They're 4 1/2 by 4 1/2 inches, square with clipped corners, and they frame beautifully - alone in a den, an office or a cigar room by the humidor, or in a group with your other cigar labels where the gold ties the whole wall together. The supply is finite - nobody's embossing Big Wolf labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.