Antique 1930s-1960s Martin Mild Perfecto 🍂 Cigar Band Label Burgundy Red New Old Stock Collector

Who Smoked Martin Mild Perfectos? 🍂 A Cigar Band Made to Be Torn

Size: 2 3/4" x 3/4"

Most cigar bands were slipped off and dropped in an ashtray. This one was built to be ripped. The pointed end of this Martin Mild Perfecto cigar band is printed TEAR HERE, because the band was the pull strip that opened a cigar sealed in cellophane. This one never met its cigar. It is unused new old stock, flat and whole, from the years when American drugstore cigars came wrapped in cellophane.

What Is Printed on It

A long, narrow red paper strip, 2.75 x 0.75 inches, printed in white. MILD sits on the left, MARTIN in bold capitals inside a scrollwork oval at the center, and PERFECTO on the right, with two fine white rules running the length of the band. The right end narrows to a point and reads TEAR HERE, printed sideways. The left end is a plain, unprinted white tab. The back is plain paper, with the lettering showing faintly through in reverse.

How the Band Dates Itself

A tear strip only makes sense on a wrapped cigar, and wrapping cigars in cellophane took an invention. Early cellophane kept water out but was not moisture-proof, and cigars dried out inside it. In 1927 DuPont chemist William Hale Charch developed a lacquer coating that made cellophane moisture-proof. Cellophane sales tripled between 1928 and 1930, and from 1930 the tobacco industry became the first industry to adopt it widely. Cigars could now be slipped by machine into tubes of cellophane.

Then the wrappers needed a way to open. On September 18, 1934, Joseph A. Neumair filed a patent for International Cigar Machinery Co. on a tear strip wrapping machine, for cigars sealed in moisture-proofed cellophane envelopes with a tear strip sticking out of the seam and a pointed tab on its end to pull. It was granted on September 20, 1938. In 1960 two more engineers at the same company, Francis A. Craig and Neal R. Parlatore, filed on a machine that used the cigar band itself as the tear strip, sticking the band to the cellophane and wrapping both around the cigar at once, granted on May 21, 1963. A band with a pointed TEAR HERE tab belongs to that run of cellophane-wrapped cigars, from the 1930s into the 1960s.

The Legend of the First Cigar Band

Every cigar collector hears the legend sooner or later. The story goes that Catherine the Great of Russia had her cigars wrapped in silk so they would not stain her fingers, and her court followed suit. Another tale has paper bands put on cigars shipped to England to keep gentlemen's white gloves clean. Historians think the Catherine story came from someone mistaking bands for the colored silk ribbons used to tie cigars into bundles, with a queen added for romance. The credit usually goes to Gustave Bock, a Dutch-born cigar maker in Cuba, who in the 1830s put a paper ring bearing his signature on every cigar he exported to Europe. Within two decades, banding cigars exported from Havana had become almost universal. By 1900, four of every five American men smoked cigars, and some 2 billion cigar bands were sold in the United States that year alone.

Mild, Martin, Perfecto

The band reads like a shelf tag. MARTIN is the brand. MILD is the strength. PERFECTO is the shape, or vitola: a cigar that tapers at both ends with a closed foot and swells through the middle, one of the harder shapes for a roller to make well. Three words, readable from across a tobacco counter.

Which Martin?

Martin is a name that turns up more than once in cigar history, and neither of the famous ones is this band. Kin Hubbard, the Indianapolis News humorist who created his newspaper character Abe Martin in 1904, licensed the character to the Burdena Cigar Factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, for a five-cent Abe Martin cigar, and those bands and postcards say Abe Martin. Indianapolis lore also holds that Hubbard wrote the famous quip about what this country really needs being a good five-cent cigar, and that Vice President Thomas Marshall picked it up and made it his own. The other Martin is Pedro Martín, who went to work in his father's cigar factory in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1936, left after the revolution and founded Tropical Tobacco in 1978; the cigars named for him carry "Pedro Martin." His daughter Maria, who had been president of Tropical for 18 years, launched the Martín Family of Cigars in his honor on February 1, 2011, and it came out with three blends, Gold, Ruby and Corojo. A lovely tribute, and a whole different world from a cellophane-wrapped band like this one. This band says only MARTIN. Collectors who sort through boxes of old bands like to say that a plain surname brand like this one was as likely named for the man behind a local cigar counter as for any big factory, and that the band is often the only trace left of it.

Unused, Glue Tab to Pull Tab

This band was printed and never used: never wrapped around a cigar, never stuck down, never torn. Cigar band collecting has its own name, vitolphilia, and its own collectors' group, the International Label, Seal and Cigar Band Society. A used tear-strip band ends up ripped in two and thrown away with the cellophane, so an intact one shows the whole strip the way it came from the printer.

Questions People Ask

What does TEAR HERE on a cigar band mean?

The band doubled as the pull strip on a cellophane-wrapped cigar. Pulling the pointed tab tore the cellophane open.

How old is this Martin Mild Perfecto band?

It belongs to the cellophane-wrapped cigar years, from the 1930s into the 1960s.

Has it been used?

No. Never torn, never applied.

What does Perfecto mean?

A cigar shape: narrow at both ends and fat in the middle.

How big is it?

Two and three quarter inches long and three quarters of an inch tall.

Who made Martin cigars?

The band carries the brand, strength and shape, and no maker's name.