Antique 1930s-40s Cornwall Arms Embossed Cigar Labels 🚬 Combo All 3! Philadelphia, PA

Want All Three Cornwall Arms Cigar Labels? Three Cornwall Arms Cigar Labels, Gold Embossed, Registered by Harold Levy of Philadelphia 🏛️

Size: 9 1/2" x 7", 9" x 5 1/2" ~, 5 1/2" x 2 1/2" ~ The small and medium label does have some little to slight edgewear.

There's a real pleasure in a label like this. Run a finger over the lettering and the gold is raised right up off the paper, which tells you somebody paid for dies and extra press passes because he wanted his cigar box to say something before it was ever opened. And Harold Levy put his own name on it: "TITLE AND DESIGN REGISTERED. HAROLD LEVY, PHILADELPHIA, PENNA." is printed right on the big sheet. You get all three sizes of the Cornwall Arms label in this set.

🎨 What's Printed on Them

The two big ones carry a little shield at the top with an HL monogram, Harold Levy's own initials, over a gold banner reading PHILADELPHIA; the small one is just the name and the slogan. Below it, CORNWALL ARMS runs in bold gold-embossed capitals with a deep cast shadow, and under that, in spaced gold capitals, the promise: PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF.

The large white sheet has a pale blue oval behind the lettering, the registration line under the slogan, and a second CORNWALL ARMS wordmark across the bottom. Along its bottom edge, in small type, is the printer's own credit: CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION, BROOKLYN, N.Y. The medium label is printed all over with a wood grain, an imitation of the cedar cigar boxes were known for, with a brown cast shadow behind the lettering. The small label is CORNWALL ARMS and the slogan on a pale blue-gray ground inside a printed gold border, with no shield.

🏭 The Brooklyn Press That Dates Them

That little foot line is the key to the whole set. The Consolidated Lithographing Corporation was formed around 1925, when Jacob A. Voice put it together through a merger with Wm. Steiner Sons & Co. It went on to take in Schmidt & Co. and Heywood, Strasser & Voigt, two more old names in label printing, and in 1930 it bought the cigar-label business that had passed from the American Lithographic Company to U.S. Printing & Lithograph. From the Depression into the early 1960s it was one of the biggest label printers in the country. So these labels were printed in Brooklyn, New York, and the brand itself gives an even tighter clock: the tobacco trade's register shows CORNWALL ARMS entered on September 18, 1929, by Consolidated Litho. Corp. of Brooklyn, for all tobacco products. Consolidated stayed in Brooklyn until 1952, so these come from somewhere between 1929 and the early 1950s.

👤 Cornwall Arms, a Working Brand

Cornwall Arms wasn't just a pretty sample. The brand had its own cigar band, gold and blue, and its labels went out to the trade in a salesman's sample book in these same three sizes. Levy's HL shield is on the two big pieces, so whoever rolled the cigars, the name on these belonged to him.

Here's how I think the story fits together. Cornwall Arms started out as one of the printer's own titles. Printers registered handsome names like this and sold the labels to whatever cigar man wanted them, and this one went to Harold Levy of Philadelphia, whose HL shield and registration line are on it. I'd bet he's the Harold Levy the trade papers caught in 1924 doing "missionary" work among Philadelphia's cigar dealers, calling on shops to push a brand called Popper's Ace, after his time with the Metropolitan Cigar Co. on Race Street. Nothing I've found puts him and this label in the same document, though, so that part is my best guess.

The cigars themselves really 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, with ads in Ohio and Pennsylvania offering five for 23 cents. At some point the brand also belonged to A. J. Golden, a cigar man in Baltimore and later Red Lion, Pennsylvania, and there's a version of this same label with an AJG monogram in the shield instead of Levy's HL. Which of the two had it first, I can't tell you.

🏙️ Philadelphia, Cigar City

Levy put Philadelphia on his label with good reason. By 1905 Philadelphia was one of the greatest centers of cigar manufacturing in America, and it had its own great label house, George Harris & Sons, one of the eight firms that printed about 80 percent of the country's cigar labels. Out in York County the numbers were bigger still: Red Lion, Pennsylvania made something like a tenth of all American cigars around the turn of the century, and in 1920 York County turned out 573 million cigars, about a fifth of the nation's output. Levy still sent his gold work up to Brooklyn.

📜 Why Cigar Labels Got This Fancy

Starting in 1868, federal law made every cigar box carry its factory number, district and state, plus a printed caution notice. Once every box had to wear the same government paperwork, the brands fought it out with the artwork, and embossed gold was the top of the line. A label like this was doing the selling before the lid ever came up.