Antique 1920s Glenmore Embossed Cigar Label 🏹 | Teal & Gold Tobacco Ephemera NOS

Who Found the Glenmore Cigar Labels? 🏹 Antique 1920s Embossed Teal & Gold Cigar Label, NOS

Size: 7 3/4" x 7 1/4"

In the 1970s a collector named Mark Trout spent nine months of every year on the road in a van, hunting the attics and basements of old American cigar factories for labels that had never been used. This is one of that breed: the Glenmore label, a teal-and-gold archer embossed and gilded in the 1920s and never glued into a box.

A kneeling archer draws her bow in a medallion under the name GLENMORE, and the whole sheet is pressed up into relief so the design can be felt as well as seen. It is new old stock and measures 7 3/4" x 7 1/4".

What You Are Looking At

GLENMORE appears twice, and the words REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. are printed in tiny type beside the medallion.

Turn the sheet over and the back is unprinted; the entire design, lettering and archer included, shows through as raised relief in reverse.

A Name Out of the Highlands

Glenmore is a Scottish name, from the Gaelic Gleann Mòr, "big glen." The most famous Glen More of all is the Great Glen, the fault valley that splits the Scottish Highlands for 62 miles from Inverness to Fort William. Loch Ness fills much of it, and so does its legend. Saint Columba's biographer Adomnán wrote of the saint facing down a water beast in the River Ness in the sixth century, and the modern sightings began in 1933, after a new road opened along the loch's north shore. A cigar brand could hardly have borrowed a name with more mist on it.

There was a well-known Glenmore on this side of the Atlantic too, and it came in a bottle. Two miles east of Owensboro, Kentucky, Richard Monarch's distillery was already turning out a whiskey called Glenmore when the business went bankrupt in the late 1890s. In 1901 James Thompson and his brother Francis P. Thompson, whiskey wholesalers from Louisville, bought the plant and ran it under the Glenmore name, and the Thompson family kept it going through Prohibition by bottling medicinal whiskey. The popular story is that James, who was born in County Derry in the north of Ireland, named it after Glenmore Castle near his birthplace. Monarch had the name first, though, and back in 1895 he joked in print that it was named after "that noted race-horse." There really was a thoroughbred called Glenmore. Collectors like to say the name did double duty on a cigar counter: a little Highland mist and a little Kentucky bourbon.

Why a Cigar Came in a Box With a Picture Inside the Lid

The cigar box label was born of a tax. The government taxed tobacco to pay for the Civil War, and loose cigars were nearly impossible to count. The Revenue Act of 1864 required cigars to be packed in "boxes or bundles," and the laws of 1865 went further: every cigar, foreign or domestic, had to be packed in a wooden box of 25, 50, 100 or 250. Once every cigar in America came in a box, the lid became the advertisement. Cigars were sold from open boxes on the counters of drugstores, saloons and cigar stands, and for most brands the label inside the lid was the only salesman they ever had.

The trade that grew up around that law was enormous. Tony Hyman, the historian of the American cigar industry, counts more than 1.5 million brands of U.S. cigars appearing and disappearing between 1870 and 1920. Some came from one-man shops rolling five or six boxes a day. By 1900, he writes, four out of five men smoked cigars, and "a goodly number of women and children" did too. Glenmore was one name in that crowd.

How a Label Like This Was Made

Cigar labels were stone lithographs. A label began as a sketch, became a pencil drawing and then a watercolor, and was finally drawn onto a set of lithographic stones, one for each color. The better labels were printed in 12 colors, each a separate run through the press, and after 1890 more runs were added for embossing and gilding. The gilding of the day was done with bronze powder, buffed to a shine on a wheel much like a shoe-shine buffer, and the embossing came from brass dies that pushed the paper up into relief. That relief is what shows so clearly on the back of this sheet.

Most of the work was done by a handful of houses. Hyman names George Schlegel, O. L. Schwencke, Schmidt & Co., Witsch & Schmitt, Schumacher & Ettlinger, F. Heppenheimer's Sons and Moehle Litho in New York, and George Harris & Sons in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the printers of roughly 80 percent of the market. It was standard practice for printers to destroy the original artwork, so the printed labels are what remains of the art. No printer's name appears on the Glenmore label.

REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.

The tiny line beside the medallion is a legal notice. Under the federal trademark act of February 20, 1905, the owner of a registered mark gave notice by printing "Registered in U.S. Patent Office" or its short form, "Reg. U.S. Pat. Off." The circled ® that stands in for those words today came with the Lanham Act, signed on July 5, 1946 and in force from July 1947. In a trade crowded with look-alike names, a registered mark was worth defending, and whoever owned this one put the notice right beside the archer.

The Archer and the Goddess

A kneeling figure with a drawn bow and drapery falling behind is the pose artists gave Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, whom the Greeks called Artemis. Her most famous legend is a warning. In Ovid's telling, the young hunter Actaeon stumbled on Diana bathing in a forest pool; she splashed him with water, he became a stag, and his own hounds ran him down. On the Glenmore label she is small enough to cover with a thumb, and the label's whole design leads the eye to her.

Built in the Geometry of the 1920s

The Glenmore label dates to the 1920s, and its ornament shows the decade. The squared brackets beside the laurel, the hexagon at the top of the arch and the ruled bands of gold and black belong to the geometric style later named Art Deco, after the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The older habits of the trade are still there, in the laurel sprays, the scrollwork and the classical archer.

It came at a turning point. Hyman writes that after 1920, labels "became less interesting, less varied and, thanks to the cigarette, less plentiful." The cigarette changed what Americans smoked, and the cigar label changed with it. A fully embossed and gilded label like this one is the late work of an art that was already being pushed off the counter.

How an Unused Label Survived

A label that did its job was glued inside a lid, and when the cigars were gone the box was thrown away or kept for buttons and fishing tackle. Unused labels lasted because printers, box makers and cigar manufacturers were all left holding bundles they never used, and those bundles sat on shelves long after the brands were gone. When factories closed, what was left over was usually burned.

Mark Trout is the reason so many were not. Working from turn-of-the-century city directories, he found the addresses of old cigar factories, located the buildings, tracked down the owners and searched the attics and basements, city by city and block by block. Hyman credits him with single-handedly salvaging millions of labels that would otherwise have been lost, and he became a legend among label collectors for it.

Condition

New old stock. The label was never applied to a box; the back is clean, unprinted paper with the embossing showing through, and the teal, the gold and the raised relief are crisp in every photograph.

Questions People Ask

How old is the Glenmore cigar label?

It is from the 1920s. Squared Art Deco ornament sits beside older laurel and scrollwork.

Was this label ever used on a cigar box?

No. It is new old stock, with no glue on the back and no sign it was ever mounted.

How big is it?

7 3/4" x 7 1/4".

Is the gold raised?

Yes. The gold border, the lettering and the medallion stand up from the surface, and the back of the sheet shows every one of them in reverse.

Who is the archer on the label?

A kneeling huntress in the classical pose of Diana, goddess of the hunt.

What does REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. mean?

It is the notice that a trademark was registered with the United States Patent Office, which registered trademarks as well as patents.

Where does the name Glenmore come from?

From Scottish Gaelic, Gleann Mòr, meaning "big glen," the old name of the Great Glen that holds Loch Ness.

How should a cigar label be framed?

Use an acid-free mat and backing and UV-filtering glass, and leave a little air between the glass and the paper so the embossing is never pressed flat.