Antique 1920s Red Tips Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Horse, Horseshoes

What Was Red Tips? Red Tips: a Brooklyn-Printed Cigar Label With a Black Horse, a Lucky Horseshoe and a Thousand-Year-Old Legend 🐴

Size: 8 1/2" x 7"

Nail a horseshoe over a door and, legend has it, the Devil can never come in, a bargain St. Dunstan is said to have wrung from him in a tenth-century English forge. Cigar makers knew exactly what that symbol could sell. This unused Red Tips cigar box label puts a black horse inside a horseshoe tipped in red, embossed and gold-bronzed by the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn, New York, the firm Fortune magazine called "America's foremost maker" of cigar-box art in 1933.

What Is on the Label

The sheet measures 8 1/2" x 7". RED TIPS arches across the top. Below it, a horse with a fancy bridle looks out from inside a horseshoe dotted with nail holes, its heels capped and a bar across the toe, with a riding crop lying across the lower curve of the shoe. In small type at the left edge of the oval the label reads TITLE & DESIGN OWNED BY W. J. N. & CO., and at the right, CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION BROOKLYN N.Y. Along the bottom of the same sheet runs a second RED TIPS panel flanked by two small horseshoes.

The lettering, the horse and the shoe are all embossed, and on the back of the sheet the whole design shows through in reverse as raised relief in plain paper. The back is clean: this label was never glued to a box.

Dating It by the Printer's Name

The printer's line settles the earliest date. Jacob A. Voice established his lithography business in 1903 and had organized his own company by 1911. In 1925 his firm took the name Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, bringing in the lineage of Wm. Steiner & Sons, lithographers since 1896, who had grown out of Steiner & Rosenthal of 1884. A label printed with the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation name was printed no earlier than 1925, which makes this a 1920s Red Tips label at the earliest.

Consolidated Lithographing: Brooklyn's Label Giant

Consolidated grew into one of the largest printers of paper labels in the country. When the American Lithographic Company was sold in 1929 to the United States Printing and Lithographic Company, the new owner sold off the cigar label business in 1930, and Consolidated bought it. That was quite a thing to buy. American Lithographic had been stitched together in 1892 by Joseph P. Knapp, who rolled a whole row of the old lithograph houses into one company, George S. Harris & Sons, Heppenheimer, Schumacher & Ettlinger, Witsch & Schmitt and Donaldson Brothers among them, largely to get a firm grip on the cigar label trade. So in 1930 the cigar label business built out of those nineteenth-century shops landed in Brooklyn, under Consolidated's roof. The timing was brutal for the trade: around 1930 the cigar industry was collapsing under competition from cigarettes, and thousands of its competitors did not survive it. Consolidated did, and in March 1933 Fortune magazine gave Voice's company that crown. Cigars were never the whole story there, either. The same presses turned out labels for White Rock sodas, Yuban coffee, Flagstaff jellies and preserves, Helena Rubinstein and Revlon cosmetics and even watch bracelets, and Consolidated did the color printing for many Doubleday books. I love that the shop that pressed this horse into paper was also printing ginger ale labels. Sidney P. Voice, the firm's vice-president, kept a collection of cigar bands that is preserved today at the New-York Historical Society.

Brooklyn was an independent city until January 1, 1898, when it joined Greater New York; by the time this label was printed, "Brooklyn N.Y." meant a borough of the largest city in America.

How the Cigar Box Got Its Label

The label exists because of a tax law. The Revenue Act of 1864 required cigars to be packed in boxes, and an 1865 law standardized them in counts of 25, 50, 100 and 250, each box stamped with its factory number and tax district. Once every cigar came in a box, the box became an advertisement, and manufacturers competed with ever-brighter labels to sell a whole box rather than a single smoke.

After 1870, New York filled with German-born lithographic houses turning out that art: Schumacher & Ettlinger, the Knapp Company, F. Heppenheimer, George Schlegel, and Witsch & Schmitt. Embossed cigar labels appeared in 1884, and from the 1890s printers added extra press runs for embossing and gilding, pressing the paper into relief dies and laying on metallic powder that was buffed to a shine.

Gold That Is Really Bronze

The gold on labels like this is almost always bronze. In the United States most lithographers used bronze flakes applied over the dies and pressed hard into the paper; European printers were the ones known for adding 24-carat gold dust for a brighter shine, and some companies reported using 24-carat gold dust while others used bronze. Consolidated's own labels of this period were finished with gold bronzing, and it is that bronze, pressed into embossed letters, that still flashes when the label is tilted to the light. The combination of chromolithographed color, deep embossing and bronzing was a craft largely lost after the 1920s, and modern printing has never matched it.

The Legend of the Lucky Horseshoe

Dunstan was a real man: a tenth-century English monk who worked as a blacksmith and later became Archbishop of Canterbury. The story goes that the Devil walked into his forge and demanded to have his hooves shod. Dunstan nailed a horseshoe to the Devil's hoof so painfully that the Devil begged for release, and Dunstan pulled it off only after the Devil promised never to enter a place where a horseshoe hung over the door. Iron was thought to hold its own magic, since it survived fire, and the blacksmith's trade was counted lucky, so the horseshoe became a good-luck charm. On this label the shoe is drawn with its open end upward, its red tips framing the horse.

The Artists Nobody Named

The label credits two companies, the brand's owner and its printer, and no artist. That is how nearly all cigar label art was made: drawn by skilled commercial artists whose names never appeared on the work, then transferred color by color onto the press. The horse's bridle, the shading in the yellow ground and the texture of the shoe are their signature.

Questions People Ask

How old is it?

No earlier than 1925, when the printer took the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation name, making it a 1920s label at the earliest.

What does the brand-owner line mean?

It means the cigar company W. J. N. & Co. owned the Red Tips brand name and this artwork, and hired Consolidated to print it.

Is the gold real gold?

Almost certainly bronze. American label printers overwhelmingly used bronze flakes pressed into the embossing.

Has it been used?

No. The back is clean paper showing only the reverse of the embossing, so it was never applied to a cigar box.

How should it be framed?

Use a mat or spacers so the glass does not press on the embossing, and hang it where light falls across the surface at an angle so the relief and the bronze show.