Antique 1930s-40s Cornwall Arms Embossed Cigar Label Small 🚬 Philadelphia, PA

Who Made Cornwall Arms Cigars? 🎩 Antique Embossed Cigar Label, the Small One: "Perfection in Every Puff"

Size: 5 1/2" x 2 1/2" ~ Slight flaw bottom left corner, see pictures.

🎩 CORNWALL ARMS in tall gold capitals, every letter thrown forward off a hatched blue shadow so the name stands right up off the paper, and under it, PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF. This is the small label from the Cornwall Arms family, gold embossed, never put on a box, and it's a little beauty.

🔍 What's On It

Two lines and nothing else: CORNWALL ARMS and PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF, inside a plain gold rule on a soft blue-gray ground. No maker, no city and no factory number on this little one; the bigger labels of the brand carry the HL shield with its PHILADELPHIA banner. Turn it over and you can read the whole label backwards in the paper. That's die embossing: the sheet went through a press between a raised die and a recessed one, and it took the shape for good. Gold ink is cheap by comparison. A die cut for one brand and a second trip through the press is what made a nickel cigar feel like a luxury in your hand.

🏷️ The Cornwall Arms Story

Cornwall Arms didn't start with a cigar maker. The tobacco trade's register shows the name entered on September 18, 1929, by the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn itself, for all tobacco products. Label printers registered handsome names like this and sold the labels to whatever cigar man wanted them. This one ended up with Harold Levy of Philadelphia, whose name and HL monogram are on the bigger labels, and I'd bet he's the Harold Levy the trade papers caught in 1924 calling on Philadelphia's cigar dealers as a "missionary" salesman. Nothing puts him and the label in the same document, so that part is my best guess. Later the brand also belonged to A. J. Golden, a cigar man in Baltimore and then Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia was a natural home for a brand like this. Lancaster County, an hour or so west, was one of the great tobacco counties of the country, and by 1859 it alone was growing sixty-five percent of Pennsylvania's crop, the leaf the city's cigar makers rolled.

And the cigars sold. Peoples Drug Stores in Washington ran Cornwall Arms at a nickel apiece in 1934, and in 1943 a box of fifty went for $1.95. "Arms," by the way, is doing deliberate work in that name: not Cornwall Cigars or Cornwall Select, but Cornwall Arms, a coat of arms, borrowed old-world pedigree for a five-cent smoke.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

Not as old as it's sometimes called. The name was registered in September 1929, and Consolidated printed in Brooklyn until 1952, with the cigars advertised through the 1930s and 40s. So this label is from the 1930s or 40s, not the early 1900s.

🖼️ Display

Small enough to tuck into a frame with its bigger siblings, or on its own in a little shadowbox where the embossing can throw a shadow. Collectors of cigar bands and labels, the International Seal, Label and Cigar Band Society crowd included, like the small inner labels for exactly that reason. My pictures seriously don't do it justice.