Antique 1900s - 1920s Garcia Gold Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Americana

Garcia Cigars Inner Label 🚬 "Quality - Panetela," Gold-Embossed Griffin Crest

Size: 9 1/4" x 6 1/2"

This one has real presence. GARCIA in big red letters over a full coat of arms - a closed knight's helm with one red plume and one white, two black griffins rearing up on either side, and a shield with a key, three fleurs-de-lis and two red towers - with gold scrollwork pressed right up off the paper and CIGARS on a little banner underneath. Along the bottom, in plainer red type: QUALITY - PANETELA. It's the big inner label from inside the lid, never used, and you can see the whole crest embossed through the back. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🚬 What a Panetela Is

A panetela is the long, slim cigar shape - pencil-thin and elegant rather than short and fat. The word comes from American Spanish, where a panetela was a long, thin biscuit (from the Latin panis, bread), and it only turns up in English around 1901 - which sits right with this label's 1900s to 1920s. This label went inside the lid of a box of them, and there was a matching little square outer label for the outside of the box; you'll still see the pair turn up together.

🛡️ The Crest

Griffins - eagle in front, lion behind - are about the oldest guardians there are: they go back to ancient Elam in Iran, the Persians called them shirdal, the lion-eagle, the Greeks carved them, and in the Middle Ages they became one of the favorite beasts in European heraldry, standing for courage and vigilance. A heraldry writer of the late 1300s said a griffin borne in arms meant the first man to carry it was strong and quick to fight, with the natures of both the eagle and the lion in him. A closed helm over a shield is the classic sign of a family coat of arms. On the shield, the old heraldry glossaries say keys turn up most in the arms of churches and abbeys under the patronage of St. Peter, and in other arms were taken to mean an office of state; and the fleur-de-lis, a stylized lily, was the emblem on the coat of arms of France from the Middle Ages right up to the Revolution in 1789. Spanish names and Old World crests were the cigar trade's favorite way of saying "quality" - a box that looked like it came from a castle. That plainer QUALITY - PANETELA line, set in a different type from the rest, looks like it was added to a finished design to name the size of cigar in the box.

✨ How the Gold Got There

The inside label was a cigar maker's pride, and it got the full treatment. An artist made the drawing, and the printer's staff lithographic artists copied it by hand onto heavy limestone printing stones with a grease pencil. The better labels went through the press as many as 12 times, one run for every color, and after about 1890 they went back through again to be embossed and then gilded - with gold leaf, or with bronze powder buffed on by a wheel a lot like a shoe-shine buffer. That's how the scrollwork here stands up off the paper and the whole crest comes through on the back. The printers usually destroyed the original artwork as soon as it was on the stone, so the printed labels are about all that's left of it.

After 1920 the labels got plainer and fewer. Photoengraving and four-color presses came in about the same time as cigar-making machines, cigarettes were taking over, and fully 80 percent of America's cigar factories closed in less than a decade.

📜 The Stories

Collector lore has an old saying from the trade: that a man who found a cigar he liked looked for the label, not the name - he'd remember the griffins and the helmet long after he forgot what the box said.

There was good reason the picture mattered that much. Between 1870 and 1920 more than a million and a half brands of American cigars came and went, and a colorful inside label was what made one box stand out from a whole counter of look-alikes.

Handsome framed in a den, a library or anywhere with a bit of Old World style.