Antique BB Monogram Gold Embossed Cigar Label 📜 1900s-1920s Red & Gold Floral

Two Letters in Gold 📜 An Antique BB Monogram Cigar Label

Size: 8 1/2" x 6"

Here's a cigar label that keeps its secrets. Two white letters, BB, sit on a red medallion inside a raised gold frame, with a red blossom on a purple square to each side and green leaves curling out behind. No brand, no maker, no town, just the monogram and a lot of gold. And if you know somebody with the initials B.B., you've just found their present.

🖨️ A Label Off the Printer's Shelf

Cigar label printers didn't only make labels to order. They kept stock designs ready to go, so a small factory could buy something handsome without paying an artist, and the old story goes that the same pretty face could be sold as Ermintrude in Boston and Daisy in Dubuque. A monogram worked the same way: any cigar maker whose name or brand fit the letters could put it in his boxes. These BB sheets still turn up by the bundle, which tells you they were printed in quantity, and none of them names the factory that bought them.

✨ How the Gold Got There

Labels like this went through the press one color at a time, then through an embossing press with a matched pair of dies, which is what lifts the frame, the flowers and the letters up off the paper. The gold was laid on as leaf or bronze powder and burnished to a shine. Turn one over and the whole design shows through the back in reverse.

🕰️ When

Nothing on the sheet carries a date. Gold-embossed labels like this belong to the great years of the American cigar label, and dealers place them in the 1900s through the 1920s, which is where I'd put it too.

🔎 Condition

Unused, never applied to a box. These come from a group, so expect small differences from one to the next in trim.

🖼️ Living With It

It frames up beautifully on its own, and the red and gold look right at home in a den, a bar or a study. Pair it with other old cigar labels for a wall that glows.