Antique Big Wolf Cigar Label 🚬 Strip Embossed Gold Foil High Grade Hand Made NOS Tobacco Ephemera Collector

Big Wolf Cigar Label Strip 🐺 High Grade, Hand Made - James W. Smith Cigar Co.

Size: 10" x 1"

Long, skinny and loaded with gold: BIG WOLF in raised white letters on a red banner, curls of embossed gold scrollwork on both sides, and HIGH GRADE and HAND MADE in green out at the ends. Never used, and the plain back shows the embossing pushed through in reverse. I've got a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🐺 Where the Wolf Comes In

This strip is the bottom banner of the Big Wolf inner box label, word for word. The big label has a snarling green wolf with every tooth showing, two gold 5¢ coins, and in tiny type, "Title and design owned by the James W. Smith Cigar Co." So this was a nickel cigar - a fierce one - and the strip went along the edge of the box to match.

The same company's name turns up on another label from around 1910: Edmund Halley, the astronomer who first worked out the orbit of the comet that carries his name, with a gold embossed telescope and sextant on either side of him. That one was made for the "James W. Smith Cigar Co., U.S.A." and published by Benjamin J. Kane of Philadelphia, and the line under the picture reads "Title and Design Owned by Ben. Kane, Philadelphia, PA." Halley's Comet swung back past the earth in 1910, Europe and America both had comet fever, and that label was made to ride it.

🏛️ In a Museum, Too

The Cincinnati Art Museum has Big Wolf cigar box labels in its print collection, a gift of Ellery Karl, catalogued as color lithographs with embossing from the early 20th century, made for the James W. Smith Cigar Co. and printed by "Henlith-Cin." That's shorthand for Henderson Lithographing of Cincinnati - Hen-lith, Cin. - the big label and poster house at 418 Sycamore Street, which Strobridge Lithographing of nearby Norwood bought in 1925.

Dealers have dated Big Wolf labels anywhere from about 1910 into the 1920s, and that fits a Cincinnati printing.

⭐ On the Collectors' List

Cigar label collectors keep two lists of the labels they chase. The older one is the Instone 100. The newer one is the CL-500 - the Cigar Label 500 - put together by a group of about twenty veteran collectors out of the sought-after labels that didn't make the Instone 100, and Big Wolf is on it, right alongside Covered Wagon, Nebraska Girl, Speculator and Pony Post. Not bad company for a nickel cigar.

🏭 Bundles of Big Wolf in Red Lion

Now here's a real piece of Big Wolf history. In 1999 Chip Brooks wrote up Factory 417 for The Cigar Label Gazette. It stood in Red Lion, Pennsylvania - the York County town that by 1927 was turning out a fifth of all the nickel cigars made in America - and it belonged to W. C. Frutiger & Co. William Christian Frutiger, "W.C. as he preferred to be called," got into the cigar business around 1900, and Factory 417 made cigars from 1920 to 1967, by hand at first and then by machine; the switch came in 1950. Big Wolf was one of the titles it used, along with Bank Note, Hambone, Sun Maid, Victory, Banker's Bouquet and El Garcia.

W.C.'s grandson Bob worked at Factory 417 from 1952 to 1955, in his late teens, and while he was there he noticed "bundles and bundles of Big Wolf labels which were being stored but not being used at the time." Brooks also wrote that there are two versions of the Big Wolf label - the J. Smith one, and one lithographed by Schlegel that has no writing along the bottom. That's George Schlegel Lithographing of New York, the cigar label house founded in 1849 and run by four generations of the family.

📜 The Stories

Old-timers in the label-collecting world tell of the warehouse discoveries - whole runs of unused cigar labels found in drawers and flat files in shuttered factory buildings, gathered up in the 1970s and 1980s before the buildings came down - and among collectors the story goes that Big Wolf stock like this came out of one of those undistributed runs. It gets told with the easy confidence of passed-down truth, and I'm not about to argue with it.

It looks sharp framed long over a bar, a desk or a doorway - and if you want the whole wolf, the big Big Wolf labels turn up too.