Antique 1930s Abe Martin Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Famous Cartoon, Kin Hubbard

Abe Martin Cigar Label 😄 "By Ginger!" - Kin Hubbard's Brown County Philosopher

Size: 8 1/2" x 6 1/2"

Abe Martin himself in a gold-beaded oval - whiskers, old hat, pipe in hand - captioned BY GINGER, with Martin's Farm in deep snow on one side and Martin's Farm in summer on the other, and ABE MARTIN in big red letters top and bottom. Embossed, never used, the whole design pressed right through to the back. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

📰 Who Was Abe Martin?

The most quoted man in Indiana who never existed. Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1868, drew him for The Indianapolis News, where he'd started out as an illustrator in 1891 - the first Abe Martin ran on December 17, 1904, and by February 1905 Hubbard had settled him in Bloom Center, Brown County. Abe had the back page of the News for 26 years. Two lines a day of dry Hoosier wisdom, like "It's no disgrace t' be poor, but it might as well be," and after 1910 about 200 newspapers carried him. Will Rogers called Hubbard "America's greatest humorist." Hubbard died of a heart attack on December 26, 1930, at 62 (the papers kept Abe Martin going until 1937), and in 1932 Brown County State Park built the Abe Martin Lodge up on Kin Hubbard Ridge, with cabins named for the folks in the strip - you can still sleep in them. Hubbard lived in Indianapolis, but he was a regular visitor to Nashville and the Brown County woods.

🚬 The Five-Cent Cigar

Here's my favorite part. Indiana's Thomas Marshall - governor, then Woodrow Wilson's vice president - is remembered for one line. Presiding over the Senate in 1914, after a long speech about everything the country needed, he quipped, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar." The papers ran it everywhere. But Indianapolis historians tell it this way: after Marshall died in 1925, it came out that the quip was really Kin Hubbard's - and Hubbard got the last word. He licensed Abe Martin to the Burdena Cigar Factory in Indianapolis, which made the five-cent Abe Martin cigar, and the ads said it all: "'By Ginger!' exclaimed Abe. 'It's good.'" That's the BY GINGER on this label - and local legend in Brown County has it that Hubbard kept a close eye on how Abe looked in print and okayed the cigar art himself. Indianapolis was a real cigar town then, too - more than 30 local factories turning out five-cent cigars while Marshall was governor, and more than 90 back in the 1880s.

Hubbard's biographer, Fred Kelly, traced the line to Kin's courting days. Josephine Jackson's father wasn't keen on a newspaper cartoonist for a son-in-law, and when he finally came around, Kin handed him a cigar. The old man thanked him for it, and Kin, embarrassed and pleased, said, "What this country needs is a good five cent cigar" - then used it in an Abe Martin soon after. Kin and Josephine married in 1905, and Kelly called Marshall "an ardent Abe Martin fan." Funny thing is, the line was going around long before either of them used it - in 1875 papers were already quoting the Danbury News: "What this country really needs is a good five cent cigar."

🎨 The Label

Cigar labels show you what antique advertising is all about, with graphics that lithography and embossing provided that modern printing just can't reproduce. Old dealers like to say the embossers used real gold, and the shine on this one sure makes you believe it. The better labels went through the press a dozen times, one run for every color, then again for the embossing and the gilding - gold leaf, or bronze powder buffed on with a wheel. Most of the artists who made labels like this were talented, paid very little, and got no credit at all - the printers usually destroyed the original artwork as soon as it had been copied onto the stone. My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

Perfect framed in a den or study - especially if you've got Indiana roots. The supply is finite - nobody's embossing Abe Martin cigar labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.