Antique 1900s Christy Girl Cigar Label 🚬 Maryland Litho Co Embossed Octagonal Die-Cut NOS Chromolithograph

Who Was the Christy Girl? 🎨 An Antique Embossed Cigar Label Printed in Baltimore

Size: 4 1/2" x 4 1/2"

A young woman with her hair piled high looks straight out at you, and CHRISTY GIRL arches over her head in dotted letters. This is an outer cigar box label, die-cut (cut to shape) as an octagon with clipped corners. It's also embossed, which means the design was pressed up from behind into raised relief. Turn it over and her portrait, the lettering and the scrollwork all show again in mirror image on the plain cream paper. Two small lines run along the bottom edge. The left one reads TITLE AND DESIGN REGISTERED. The right one reads MARYLAND LITHO. CO., BALTO.

It is a chromolithograph, which just means a picture printed in many colors from stone, one color at a time. And it's new old stock, or NOS. That means it was printed, stored and never glued to a box. No cigar ever wore one.

👩 Who was the Christy Girl?

She was dreamed up by the illustrator Howard Chandler Christy, who was born in Morgan County, Ohio, in 1872. In 1898 he drew combat scenes in the Spanish-American War, and magazines like Scribner's, Harper's, Century and Leslie's Weekly competed for his work. Then came a painting called The Soldier's Dream, printed in Scribner's, and it's usually credited as the first Christy Girl. She took over from Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl as America's ideal young woman, confident, athletic and beautiful. Christy even put out a book called The Christy Girl in 1906, published by Bobbs-Merrill. In the First World War he turned the same eye on recruiting posters, including the 1917 Navy poster "Gee!! I Wish I Were a Man." Late in his career he painted Scene at the Signing of the Constitution, which hangs in the U.S. Capitol. He died in New York on March 3, 1952.

A cigar maker who put that name on a box was borrowing all of it.

🖨️ The printer: Maryland Litho. Co.

The foot line gives the printer's name and the town, and Baltimore was a good town to be a lithographer in. A. Hoen & Co., the oldest lithographic firm in the country, worked there. It began in 1835 as Edward Weber & Co. and was later taken over by August Hoen.

Maryland Litho wasn't the only printer of this brand, either. Art of the Print shows a Christy Girl label from the Schlegel Litho Company of New York, with the line "Title and Design Registered by Lee Heine." Schlegel was a New York firm run by four generations of one German family and best known for cigar labels. That printing puts a name after the word registered. The Maryland Litho label puts none. The Old Print Shop in New York dates a larger Maryland Litho Christy Girl label, one with a golf scene beside the portrait, to about 1905.

🎨 How a label like this was made

Every color got its own slab of Bavarian limestone. The slabs ran three or four inches thick and could weigh up to 600 pounds, so just moving them was a job. By 1892 printers had 38-ton presses and machined dies to raise the design, and the raised parts were then highlighted with 22-karat gold or bronze leaf. Embossing stretches paper hard, so printers switched from cheap short-fiber stock to long-fiber rag paper that bends instead of breaking. That's a big part of why labels this old can still look bright.

Lithographers also sent salesmen out with sample books of label designs to show cigar makers, and that part is on the record. The lore adds that some sample runs never went to a factory at all. They went back into a printer's files and sat there for decades. Old-timers in the tobacciana trade tell another story about where unused labels come from. They say many turned up in warehouse finds, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, as leftover stock from cigar factories and print shops was cleared out. It's a good story.

📅 How old is it?

Nothing on the label carries a date, but she tells you when she's from. That upswept pompadour and high collar are the Gibson Girl look, in style from the 1890s until the First World War. Christy's own Christy Girl book came out in 1906, and the Old Print Shop puts the larger Maryland Litho Christy Girl at about 1905. So I have this one as the 1900s, embossed stone printing from the golden age of stone lithography, which one history of the craft dates from about 1870 to 1920.

An octagon frames easily in a square mat. The supply is finite, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.