Antique 1900s - 1920s Jewelo Gold Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Americana!

What Was Jewelo? One Word in Gold Among a Million and a Half Cigar Brands 👑

Size: 10" x 6" ~ Little to no wear.

Between 1870 and 1920, more than 1.5 million brands of American cigars came and went. Each needed a box label that could stop a smoker at the tobacco counter, and most reached for color, as many as twelve inks on the better ones. Jewelo went the other way, and I love it for that. There's no color on this label at all: just cream paper, one word, Jewelo, in raised gold script, crossed by a crown-topped scepter and anchored by a knight's helmet over a shield, with white scrolls pressed into the paper behind them. The same brand also wore a full-color label of a cavalier courting a country girl, and this is its gold version.

🏷️ What the Label Shows

The name runs across in big copperplate script, every stroke of the gold edged with a fine beaded line. A thin scepter cuts diagonally through it, topped with a fleur-de-lis, a crown, an orb and a cross, and tied with a bow of beaded cord ending in two tassels. Below sits the crest: a closed knight's helmet with little wings, over a scroll-edged shield quartered with two keys and two letter A's, a sword and a tasseled cord behind it. Behind the shield, leafy white scrolls are raised in the paper itself with no ink or gold on them at all. Nothing else is printed, not a maker, a lithographer, a city or a factory number. Turn it over and the back is blank, the whole design pressed through in reverse.

✨ How Gold Got onto a Cigar Label

A label like this took several trips through the press. The better cigar labels were printed in as many as twelve colors, each one its own press run, and after 1890 the printers added two more steps, embossing and gilding. The gilding was done with a bronze powder, and Cigar Aficionado describes it being worked onto the sheet with a shoe-shine-type buff wheel. Embossing came from a matched pair of dies, one raised and one recessed, squeezing the paper between them so the design stands up on the front and sinks into the back.

Jewelo shows both processes side by side. The name, the scepter and the crest are embossed and gilded, so they catch the light and throw a little shadow. The scrolls behind the shield are embossed with no gold at all, which is called blind embossing, so they only show up as white relief when light rakes across the sheet.

👑 The Jewelo Brand

This sheet prints the brand and nothing else, but the other Jewelo labels fill in a little. The colored inner label, a cavalier in a plumed hat courting a country girl, carries this very same crest device, the crown-topped scepter and shield, flanking its oval, so the two are one brand's family of labels. A New York print dealer catalogs that colored label as an embossed color lithograph of about 1920, with its title and design registered by "C.C. Co." Historic New England, the regional heritage organization, holds a Jewelo cigar label in its collection too, cataloged as location unknown and undated. The name itself is coined, the word jewel with an -o on the end, which suits a label that's all gold.

📈 The Cigar Label Boom

That 1.5 million figure comes from Cigar Aficionado, which also records that the big cigar companies ordered fancy labels in lots of 100,000 or more, while simple one- and two-color labels might run as few as 1,000 at a time. Lithographers printed stock pictorial labels with no brand name, too, so any small factory could add its own, and the old story goes that the same cigar-label girl could be "Daisy" in Dubuque, "Dora" in Kansas City, "Donna" in Des Moines or "Ermintrude" in Boston.

A handful of lithographers did most of the work. Seven firms, George Schlegel, O. L. Schwenke, Schmidt & Co., Witsch & Schmitt, Schumacher & Ettlinger, F. Heppenheimer's Sons and Moehle Litho, plus Philadelphia's George Harris & Sons, accounted for roughly 80 percent of the cigar labels used in the country.

🕰️ When the Gold Went Out

After 1920, as Cigar Aficionado puts it, labels became less interesting. Photoengraving, four-color presses and new machinery came in at the same time that fully 80 percent of the country's cigar factories closed, in less than a decade. The embossed and gilded label, built one press run at a time, belongs to the years before that change. My pictures seriously don't do it justice; you have to tilt it in the light.

🛡️ Crown, Scepter, Helmet and Shield

The pieces are the general regalia of rank: a crown with an orb and a cross, a scepter tied with a tasseled bow, a closed helmet, a sword and a keyed shield. Set on a box of cigars, alongside a name built on the word jewel, they made a simple promise to the smoker lifting the lid: what's inside is worth it.

Old labels like this are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. Museums have galleries of them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. They aren't making any more vintage labels, obviously, so once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.

Most of these artists were very good but desperate for work during that era, and got paid very little and received no recognition for their work. Unfortunately, the majority of these artists will remain unknown, but we can keep their art alive forever.