{"product_id":"antique-large-sonny-boy-embossed-cigar-label-1920s-treasures","title":"Antique 1920s - 1930s Large Sonny Boy Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Historic!","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWho Smoked Sonny Boy Cigars? 🎩 A Smoking Jacket, a Wingback Chair and a Five-Cent Cigar\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 8 3\/4\" x 8\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kmUtUS5ICYI\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eA father sits back in a wingback armchair, dressed in a smoking jacket with a shawl collar. His curly-headed boy, in a sailor suit, is perched on his knee with a box of cigars in his lap and one hand up at his father's chin. Beside the chair a cigar rests in an ashtray, and a thin thread of smoke climbs past the wing of the chair. Two shields give the price, 5¢, and two more promise MILD.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the large Sonny Boy cigar box label, the one that carries the whole scene, and in tiny capitals along its bottom edge it names the house that printed it: CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION BROOKLYN N.Y. The firm only took the Consolidated name in 1925, so the label is no older than that. In March 1933 \u003cem\u003eFortune\u003c\/em\u003e ran a feature on cigar-box art built around the man who organized that company, Jacob A. Voice, and named him, \"by common acclaim,\" America's foremost maker of it. This one is unused new old stock that was never pasted to a box, with the gold still bright and the embossing standing up off the paper.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🔍 What Is Printed on This Label\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe label is a nearly square sheet of paper, lithographed in full color with gold and embossed so the lettering and the figures stand in relief. SONNY BOY is printed on it twice.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCentered under the lower SONNY BOY is the printer's line.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the back the paper is plain, with the design pressed through in reverse by the embossing die, both SONNY BOYs backward.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🧥 The Jacket, the Sailor Suit and the Wing Chair\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEverything the artist put this father in and around has a history of its own. The smoking jacket was designed in the 1850s. London's \u003cem\u003eGentleman's Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e described it as a \"kind of short robe de chambre\" of velvet, cashmere, plush, merino or printed flannel, lined in bright colors. When the Crimean War made Turkish tobacco popular in Britain, smoking took off, and a gentleman might put on a smoking jacket after dinner and retire to a smoking room, the jacket taking the smoke and the falling ash instead of his good clothes. The classic cut has a shawl collar and turn-up cuffs, which is exactly what the man in this chair is wearing. The jacket stayed in fashion well into the twentieth century: Cary Grant, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra wore them, and Fred Astaire was buried in one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe boy's outfit goes back to 1846, when the four-year-old Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was given a scaled-down copy of the uniform worn by the ratings on the Royal Yacht. Franz Xaver Winterhalter painted him in it that year, popular engravings spread the look, and by the 1870s the sailor suit had become fashionable dress for boys and girls in many countries.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe chair is older still. Wing chairs were first made in England in the 1600s and caught on in the 1720s. The wings shielded the sitter from draughts and trapped the heat of the fireplace the chair was usually drawn up to. There is a grislier story too: the first winged chairs are said to have been all-wood seats used by barber-surgeons, the wings keeping draughts from blowing hair and blood around during an operation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🧾 5¢ and MILD: The Nickel Cigar\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe price in those shields put Sonny Boy in the biggest class of cigar in America. In 1917, with the First World War to pay for, Congress went back to the Civil War system of taxing cigars by the price they were made to sell at, with revenue stamps color coded to match. There were five classes. The orange Class A stamp, for cigars sold for not more than 5¢ each, was by far the most common; green Class B covered cigars from 6¢ to 8¢. On a stamped box, the top line of the cancellation gave the factory number, the tax district and the state. The Class A stamp turned violet in mid-1940, and the whole color-coded scheme was redesigned in 1942, when taxes were raised to fight the Second World War.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Revenue Act of 1926, signed by President Calvin Coolidge on February 26 of that year, added a rule of its own: the Commissioner of Internal Revenue could require a \"conspicuous label\" on every box naming the clause of law under which the cigars inside had been tax paid, and that label had to agree with the tax-paid stamp.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNickel cigars owned the counter in those years. They made up 63 percent of all cigar sales in the twelve months from 1930, and 73 percent by July 1931, and through the 1930s about nine cigars in ten sold in the United States cost 5¢ or less. The trade was being remade underneath them. In 1929, 375 cigar factories closed, nine in ten of them shops of six or fewer workers making higher-priced cigars, and by 1930 the average cigar factory employed 64 people, against 6 in 1900. The big brands came down to meet the nickel: Phillies and Harvester were among the brands cut from 10¢ to 5¢ in 1933, and in the two years after that cut Bayuk's Phillies went from selling 17,000,000 cigars to 365,000,000 and became the best-selling cigar in the country.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏭 Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn, New York\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJacob A. Voice was born in Romania in 1884 and came to the United States at the age of three. In 1903 he went to work for Wm. Steiner \u0026amp; Sons, a lithographic house dating from 1896 that had grown out of Steiner \u0026amp; Rosenthal, founded in 1884. By 1911 he had organized a company of his own, and around 1925 he merged it with Steiner's. That year the firm's name became Consolidated Lithographing Corporation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrooklyn already had a name in the trade. The best cigar label printers were run by German immigrants: George Schlegel, O. L. Schwenke, Schmidt \u0026amp; Co., Witsch \u0026amp; Schmitt, Schumacher \u0026amp; Ettlinger and F. Heppenheimer's Sons in lower Manhattan, and Moehle Litho in Brooklyn. Consolidated moved to the front of that field. The American Lithographic Company, formed in 1892, was sold in 1929 to the United States Printing and Lithographic Company, which in 1930 sold off its cigar label business to Consolidated. When \u003cem\u003eFortune\u003c\/em\u003e turned to cigar-box art in March 1933, the artist it celebrated was, in its own words, Mr. Voice, \"or rather Mr. Voice's Consolidated Lithographing Corp.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1935 Voice gave the Museum of the City of New York a collection of cigar box labels running from about 1870 to 1930. A 1940 National Research Council listing still had him as president, at 1013 Grant St., Brooklyn. He died in 1942. Sidney P. Voice, a vice-president of Consolidated, gathered cigar bands, cigar box labels and salesman's sample books from New York and Brooklyn lithographers spanning about 1890 to 1963, and gave them to the New-York Historical Society in 1973, 1977 and 1983. The Cary Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology keeps progressive proof books of chromolithographed labels from four firms, and Consolidated is one of them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e✨ Stone, Bronze and the Embossing Die\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA label like this began as a monthlong job. It started with an idea or a rough sketch from the customer or the printer's art department. That became a finished pencil drawing, then, once approved, a watercolor. The lithographic department turned the painting into a key line drawing, a black-and-white map of every color, and staff lithographic artists drew each color onto limestone in grease pencil. It was standard practice to destroy the original painting as soon as it had been transferred to stone, which is why the artwork behind hundreds of thousands of cigar labels almost never survived.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter 1890, embossing and gilding meant extra press runs. By 1892 lithographers were embossing labels in 38-ton presses with precision-machined dies, the kind of die that raised the lettering, the figures and the shields on this sheet. The gold went on either as genuine gold leaf or as bronze powder, rubbed in with a buffing wheel much like a shoe-shine brush. Most American labels were gilded with bronze; 24-karat gold is generally found on European ones.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe people who drew them were mostly anonymous. One label artist of the period, Henry Maier, never became famous in the art world, and the story goes that he preferred partying and womanizing to work. By the 1920s lightweight metal plates on high-speed presses were replacing the Bavarian limestones, and photoengraving and four-color presses arrived together with cigar-making machinery and the closing of fully 80 percent of American cigar factories in less than a decade.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎶 \"Sonny Boy\": The Name in 1928\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor a season in 1928 those two words belonged to Al Jolson. Ray Henderson, Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown wrote \"Sonny Boy,\" and legend has it they wrote it in Atlantic City as a joke, a song so shamelessly sentimental that even Jolson would hate it. He loved it, and sang it to a little boy in \u003cem\u003eThe Singing Fool\u003c\/em\u003e, the Warner Bros. part-talkie that premiered in New York on September 19, 1928. His record held number one for twelve weeks, it became the first song from a movie to sell over a million copies, and sheet music, piano rolls and records together passed three million. One trade paper predicted the picture would be to talking pictures what \u003cem\u003eThe Birth of a Nation\u003c\/em\u003e had been to silent ones, and it stayed Warner Bros.' most successful film until \u003cem\u003eSergeant York\u003c\/em\u003e in 1941.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe boy was Davey Lee, born in Hollywood on December 29, 1924, and three years old when he played Sonny. In 1929 he starred in a picture of his own called \u003cem\u003eSonny Boy\u003c\/em\u003e and joined Jolson again in \u003cem\u003eSay It with Songs\u003c\/em\u003e. His whole film career was six pictures between 1928 and 1930, ending with \u003cem\u003eThe Squealer\u003c\/em\u003e. He died in Los Angeles on June 17, 2008, at 83. The song lived on in records by Paul Robeson, the Andrews Sisters, Sonny Rollins, Petula Clark and Mandy Patinkin, and its original words and music entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe cigar label never mentions Jolson, the song or the film. What it shares with them is the name, a father and his boy, and the same stretch of American life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🖼️ Good For\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA square frame over a bar cart, a desk or a reading chair, where the smoking jacket and the wingback feel at home.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA Father's Day, new dad or grandfather gift built around a picture of a father and his boy.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA cigar room or tobacco wall with other labels from the nickel cigar years.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA companion for \"Sonny Boy\" sheet music or a Jolson 78.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCollectors of Brooklyn and New York printing history.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e❓ Questions People Ask\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eHow old is the large Sonny Boy cigar label?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt dates to the 1920s-1930s. Its imprint, Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, is a name the Brooklyn firm took in 1925, so the label cannot be earlier. Sonny Boy's long strip label, printed with the same father and son, carries the word CELLOPHANED, a wrapper that had come into the cigar trade and could be put on by machine by the end of the 1920s, and a notice for cigars made to retail at not more than 5c, wording from the color-coded tax classes that lasted until 1942.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWho printed the Sonny Boy label?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eConsolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn, New York, the company Jacob A. Voice organized. Its imprint runs under the lower SONNY BOY.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat do the 5¢ and MILD shields mean?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e5¢ is the retail price. A nickel cigar went out in a box carrying the orange Class A revenue stamp, the commonest cigar stamp in America. MILD told the smoker what kind of smoke to expect.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eIs the gold on the label real gold?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCigar labels were gilded with either genuine gold leaf or bronze powder in extra press runs, and most American labels used bronze. Here the gold still shines on the lettering and around the shields.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eIs this label new old stock?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYes. It was never applied to a box. The back is clean paper showing only the reverse of the embossing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eHow should I frame it?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUse a mat or spacers so the glass sits off the paper and never presses on the raised lettering and figures, and hang it out of direct sun.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-1930s-sonny-boy-embossed-cigar-label-treasures-gifts\"\u003eAntique 1920s-1930s Sonny Boy 🎸 NOS Chromolithograph Cigar Box Label Embossed Cellophane Collectible\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-sweet-embossed-cigar-label-red-lion-pa-1900s-1920s-treasures\"\u003eAntique Have A Sweet Cigar Label 🍂 Embossed Red \u0026amp; Gold Litho | Red Lion PA Beauty\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-canadian-club-embossed-cigar-label-maple-leaf-version-2-red-lion-pa\"\u003eAntique 1920s - 1930s Canadian Club Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Maple Leaf, Version 2, Red Lion, PA\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40873027666085,"sku":"VAG-7064159060133","price":7.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.3352126528_ieio.jpg?v=1785355099","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-large-sonny-boy-embossed-cigar-label-1920s-treasures","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}