Antique Record Bond Cigar Label 📜 Neff & Co Red Lion Pennsylvania 1920s–1930s NOS

Who Made Record Bond Cigars in Red Lion? The Nickel Cigar That Came Back From the Dead

Size: 8 1/2" x 7"

In 2016 a York County, Pennsylvania family that prefers to stay private handed 50,000 cigar bands, box labels and keepsakes, plus seed money, to the Hamptons Cigar Manufactory & Museum in Sag Harbor, New York, so that a cigar the family once made could be rolled again. The cigar was Record Bond. This is one of its original box labels, printed in Brooklyn for Neff & Co. of Red Lion, Pennsylvania, a town that by 1927 was making a fifth of all the nickel cigars sold in America. Unused, embossed, and never glued into a box.

The Label

RECORD BOND arches across the top in red block letters edged in raised gold and runs straight across the bottom the same way. In the center a hand in a dark coat sleeve, crisp white cuff and gold cufflink grips a thick bundle of banknotes wrapped in a black band and sealed with a red wax rosette on green ribbon; the top bill shows a pink rosette and green engraving. Embossed gold coins stand two on each side, a laureled man's profile at the lower left and a woman's profile at the lower right, all on a soft sky-blue cloud. Beneath the hand: VALUE RECEIVED, and under that, REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. At the very bottom, in type smaller than a grain of rice is long, runs the printer's imprint: CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

Turn it over and the back is plain white paper with the whole design pressed through in reverse. The hand, the bundle, the coins and both RECORD BOND lines stand up from the back like a blind stamp, which shows how deep the embossing die was driven.

What the Printer's Name Tells You

That tiny imprint dates the label. Consolidated Lithographing Corporation was formed in Brooklyn in 1925, when Jacob A. Voice, a Romanian immigrant who had worked for Wm. Steiner & Sons and started his own lithography company by 1911, merged his firm with Steiner's. Its roots ran back to Steiner & Rosenthal, the cigar label lithographers William Steiner and Isaac Rosenthal founded in 1884, which became Wm. Steiner & Sons in 1896. A label carrying the Consolidated name was printed in 1925 or later, and dealers who handle Record Bond labels place them in the 1920s and 1930s.

Consolidated Lithographing and the Last of the Great Label Houses

Consolidated came along as the golden age of the lithographed cigar label was ending, and it wound up inheriting what was left. The American Lithographic Company had been formed in 1892 by Joseph Palmer Knapp, who rolled George S. Harris & Sons, Heppenheimer, Donaldson Brothers, Giles, Witsch & Schmitt and Schumacher & Ettlinger into one concern that controlled about 75% of the American market for printed graphics, with cigar labels at the heart of it. Cheaper halftone photographic printing changed the trade and wore that empire down. In 1929 it was sold to the United States Printing and Lithograph Company, which in 1930 handed the cigar label business to Consolidated, and the Brooklyn firm became one of the largest printers of paper labels in the country. By 1935 Voice's company was printing 6,500 different labels for more than 4,000 million cigars, and it was one of the largest commercial printing firms in the United States from the Depression years into the Kennedy administration.

The Voice family kept more than the business. Sidney P. Voice, Consolidated's vice-president, collected cigar bands and box labels, and the Sidney Voice collection, running from about 1890 to about 1963 and including salesman's sample books from New York and Brooklyn lithographers, is preserved today at the New-York Historical Society. Consolidated's own sample books show that it printed more than cigar labels: White Rock sodas, Yuban Coffee, Flagstaff jellies, Prest-o-Flex watch bracelets and Rubinstein and Revlon cosmetics, plus printer's proofs for Doubleday Books.

Red Lion, Pennsylvania: Nickel Cigar Town

Red Lion was settled in 1852 and named for one of its first pubs, the Red Lion Tavern; it became a borough on January 16, 1880. From the 1880s into the 1930s it was one of America's leading producers of the five-cent cigar. York County as a whole turned out 573 million cigars in 1920, about 20 percent of all the cigars made in the United States, and by 1927 Red Lion alone made a fifth of the country's nickel cigars. There were 109 cigar factories in the borough that year, and many were no more than a man, his wife and a child rolling at home. People took tobacco leaf home to strip and dry it in their own houses.

The women rolled and the men broke the bunches, and one roller remembered turning out eight or nine hundred cigars a day. The machine ended that world: a woman could roll 600 a day, and a cigar machine could make 6,000. In a bitter 1934 strike, women lay down across a factory driveway so the trucks could not get in. The story goes that labels came from the Brooklyn printers in big flat cartons, the embossed sheets nested face to face in tissue, and that the unused labels found decades later in factory storerooms and warehouse attics were surplus cartons that never reached the line. Brand names from those years still surface in collections, among them Wolf Brothers' Crooks, Red Lion Special Fives, Silver Princes and Lucky Lindys. The town has never let go of its past: Red Lion still raises a cigar to ring in the New Year.

Neff & Co. and the Name Record Bond

Neff & Co. was one of the Red Lion cigar houses of those years, and Record Bond was its cigar. The name borrows the language of money. A bond was the safest paper a careful man could hold, and "value received" is the phrase written into promissory notes and bills of exchange to say the signer got something of worth for his promise. Put a fistful of banded bills and gold coins under those words on a cigar box and the message to a smoker was plain: his nickel was well spent. REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. is the notice a brand owner printed to show the name was a trademark registered with the United States Patent Office.

The Legend of the Five-Cent Cigar

Red Lion's product owns one of the best one-liners in American politics. In 1914 Vice President Thomas R. Marshall was presiding over the Senate while a senator worked his way through a long speech built on the refrain "What this country needs..." As it dragged on, Marshall cut in, loud enough for the chamber to hear: "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar!" The joke was not his invention, but it has been his ever since, and it was towns like Red Lion that kept that cigar in American pockets.

Record Bond Today

The 2016 gift to the Sag Harbor museum was made to recreate the Record Bond cigar the family once produced in York County. The brand has since been sold again through the online retailer CigarPage as a blend with an Ecuadorian Habano wrapper, a Condega binder, and filler that includes Pennsylvania tobacco along with leaf from Condega and Estelí in Nicaragua. A little York County leaf is still in a Record Bond.

Display Ideas

• Frame it with a spacer or shadow-box mat so the glass does not flatten the raised gold.
• Hang it in a home office or den next to old stock certificates and bank notes; the money theme carries the wall.
• Give it to someone with Red Lion or York County roots as a piece of the town's working history.
• Add it to a cigar room, humidor shelf or bar cart display.
• Keep it flat in an archival sleeve as part of a cigar label or lithography collection.

Condition

New old stock: an unused label that was never pasted into a box, with strong color and crisp embossing. The back is clean white paper carrying the embossing in reverse.

How old is this Record Bond cigar label?

Its Brooklyn printer did not exist under the Consolidated name before 1925, which sets the earliest possible date; collectors put Record Bond labels in the 1920s and 1930s.

Who made Record Bond cigars?

The Neff firm in Red Lion, a York County borough at the heart of America's five-cent cigar trade.

What does "Value Received" mean on the label?

It is old commercial-paper language confirming that something worth having changed hands. On a cigar label it promised a smoker full value for his money.

What is the gold on the label?

Raised gold outlines and coins, embossed so deeply that the design shows through on the back.

How big is it?

8 1/2" x 7"~, a size that fits an 11 x 14 frame with a mat.

Was Record Bond ever made again?

Yes. A 2016 donation of the family's bands, labels and start-up funds to a Long Island cigar museum brought it back, and the new blend still carries Pennsylvania leaf.