Antique 1930s-40s Cornwall Arms 🍂 Philadelphia Embossed Cigar Box Label, Woodgrain Gold Foil "Perfection In Every Puff"

Why Is This Cigar Label Printed Like Wood? 🍂 Antique Cornwall Arms Embossed Label, Philadelphia

Size: 9" x 5 1/2" ~ Very slight wear you'd never see on display, but look at the pictures and videos and judge for yourself.

🍂 Amazing gold embossed label. CORNWALL ARMS in big gold capitals with a deep cast shadow, PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF underneath, and a little gold shield at the top with an HL monogram over a banner reading PHILADELPHIA, all of it printed on a warm orange wood grain. Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room!

🔍 What's On It

The whole sheet is printed to look like wood, an imitation of the Spanish cedar cigar boxes were known for, so the label read as part of the box. On top of that: the HL monogram shield with its PHILADELPHIA banner, CORNWALL ARMS in raised gold, and PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF in spaced gold capitals. Flip it over and every bit of it is pressed through the back in reverse, shield and all. That's real die embossing, done on heavy paper stock, which is why these stay so vibrant and new looking. Most of these were done with real gold in the embossing, the way I understand it.

🏷️ Cornwall Arms

The Cornwall Arms name was registered on September 18, 1929, by its printer, the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn, one of the biggest label houses in the country. The shield on this one belongs to Harold Levy of Philadelphia, who put his own name and monogram on the brand. My best guess is that he's the Harold Levy the cigar trade papers mention in 1924 as a Philadelphia salesman working the city's dealers. At some point the brand also passed to A. J. Golden of Baltimore and Red Lion, Pennsylvania, and there's an AJG version of this same label out there. The cigars were a nickel apiece at Peoples Drug Stores in Washington in 1934, and fifty for $1.95 in 1943.

Where the name itself came from, nobody wrote down. It might be old Cornwall in England and its coat of arms, or it might be closer to home: Pennsylvania has a Cornwall of its own, the iron-furnace town in Lebanon County, where the Cornwall Iron Furnace ran from 1742 until 1883. Either way, "Arms" put a crest on a nickel cigar.

🌱 Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Tobacco

That PHILADELPHIA on the shield had a long history behind it. As early as 1810, Tench Coxe's report on American manufactures already had Philadelphia leading Pennsylvania in snuff and cigars. After 1815, as the wheat market fell off, farmers in Lancaster County, many of them Amish and Mennonite, turned to tobacco, and by 1859 Lancaster County alone was growing sixty-five percent of the state's crop.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

1930s to 40s. The name was registered in 1929, Consolidated stayed in Brooklyn until 1952, and the cigars were in the ads in 1934 and 1943. That makes this one close to a hundred years old, or not far off it.

🎨 The Artists

Cigar labels show you what antique advertising is all about, with graphics that lithography gave us and modern printing just can't reproduce; it later became a lost art. Most of the artists who drew them were very good but desperate for work, got paid very little and received no recognition. Most of them will stay unknown, but we can keep their art alive. My pictures seriously don't do it justice.