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This is an antique New Old Stock (NOS) embossed chromolithograph inner cigar box label produced for G.W. Van Slyke & Horton of Albany, New York, under their Peter Schuyler brand name "Odd Moments," printed circa 1900s - 1920s through the early decades of the twentieth century. The label measures approximately 6 x 4.75 inches and was printed by the Schmidt Lithograph Company. It honors Peter Schuyler — the first mayor of Albany when the city was incorporated in 1686 — whose portrait appears at the center of the design. Van Slyke & Horton was one of the significant regional cigar manufacturers of the era, and the Peter Schuyler brand remained in production and active advertising well into the 1950s.
🎩 There is something about holding one of these labels that takes a moment to fully land. The paper is stiff and clean. The colors — the warm cream field, the brilliant red of the portrait cartouche, the deep golds of the embossed border ring — read with the same confidence they carried off the press more than a century ago. The portrait of Peter Schuyler at the center looks out from beneath a powdered wig, his collar crisp and white, his coat a deep red trimmed in gilt. He is wearing the dress of a colonial official because that is exactly what he was: the first mayor of a city that would grow into one of the great capitals of the American Northeast, the man who stood at the intersection of English colonial authority and the Iroquois confederacy during one of the most consequential periods in early American history. Somebody made the decision, sometime in the 1880s, to put his face on a cigar box. It was exactly the right call.
George Washington Van Slyke was born in Dutchess County around 1831. He arrived in the Albany tobacco trade in 1867, entering partnership with an established tobacconist named Edward Gee at 377 Broadway. The two men moved to 40 State Street in 1868, and by around 1870 they had parted ways — Van Slyke setting up independently at 417 Broadway under his own name. He was building something, and he knew it.
In 1880, Wallace Horton — who had been working as an agent for the firm — joined Van Slyke as a full partner, and the company became G.W. Van Slyke & Horton. 🌿 By 1885, the firm's own advertising was calling the Peter Schuyler cigar their principal brand. Production of that brand under the Van Slyke & Horton name is documented from 1889. And the name they chose for it was not incidental. Albany's first mayor was the kind of figure a cigar company wanted on its box: a man of standing, a man of history, a man whose face telegraphed quality and legitimacy without a single word of copy.
The label itself was printed by the Schmidt Lithograph Company of San Francisco, California — one of the major American lithographic houses of the era. The reach of that detail is easy to miss. A tobacco company based in Albany, New York, was contracting with a lithographer in San Francisco to print the labels that would go on its cigar boxes in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. That is how interconnected the American cigar trade had become by the time this label was produced. Nothing about it was local in the narrow sense. Every element — the design work, the printing, the distribution — moved through a national commercial network that treated a cigar label with the seriousness a fine press brought to a book cover.
🏭 Van Slyke & Horton grew steadily over the years, acquiring other cigar manufacturers along the way, including the T.E. Brooks Company. The factory eventually relocated to Red Lion, Pennsylvania, on South Pine Street — and that relocation places the company at the center of one of the more quietly remarkable chapters in American tobacco history. Old-timers in York County have long held that Red Lion and the surrounding area produced somewhere near one-eighth of all the cigars made in the United States during the first quarter of the twentieth century. One-eighth. The town's identity was built around the trade, and Van Slyke & Horton was part of the infrastructure that made it possible. The end of that era came with the closing of the South Pine Street factory, a quiet conclusion to a story that had started in an Albany storefront half a century before.
Pieter Schuyler was born September 17, 1657, and died February 19, 1724. When Albany was incorporated as a city in 1686, he became its first mayor — and simultaneously served as the ex officio chairman of the board of commissioners for Indian affairs. That second role was not ceremonial. It placed him at the center of the diplomatic relationship between the English colonial administration and the Iroquois confederacy during one of the most politically volatile periods in the history of the northeastern colonies.
🌍 In 1710, Schuyler personally escorted four Iroquois leaders — known in England as the Four Indian Kings — across the Atlantic to meet with imperial authorities in London. The delegation received an audience with Queen Anne herself. It was one of the most extraordinary diplomatic missions of the colonial era, and Schuyler was the man who made it happen. The portrait on this label, framed in its deep gold embossed ring, his wig curling at the shoulders, his red coat carrying the quiet authority of a colonial official — that is the man who stood in the court of Queen Anne and argued for the interests of his city and his allies. Cigar collectors who know the backstory never look at the label the same way twice.
The name "Odd Moments" appears prominently on the label — printed in confident gold block letters below the portrait medallion, above the company credit for G.W. Van Slyke & Horton. Among collector circles, the informal explanation for the brand name has always been that these were the cigars a man reached for in the idle spaces of his day: the quiet half-hour after supper, the pause between appointments, the spare moment on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing demanded his attention and a good cigar was all the occasion required. No corporate documentation of the naming rationale has ever surfaced in the published literature. But the logic holds, and it is exactly the kind of brand thinking that made the cigar trade so good at selling small luxuries to men who needed an excuse for them.
The Schmidt Lithograph Company of San Francisco was not a minor printer. The firm operated during what historians of American commercial printing now recognize as the golden age of stone chromolithography — the decades on either side of 1900 when the lithographic houses that served the cigar industry were employing some of the most technically accomplished commercial artists in the country. Multi-color stone lithography was not a fast process and it was not a forgiving one. Each color required its own stone, its own pass through the press, its own exact registration against every layer that preceded it.
✨ A label with this many elements — the cream field, the warm-toned portrait, the red cartouche, the embossed gold ring around the medallion, the lettering above and below — represented real hours of skilled craft at every stage of production. The embossing is structural. It raises the gold border ring above the surface of the label paper so that it catches light differently depending on the angle. That is not an effect you can reproduce with a flat print. It requires a separate die-strike after the chromolithography is complete. The result is a label that functions simultaneously as printed art and as a small sculptural object. Under proper display lighting — a single source coming in from one side — the raised gold border catches the beam and the whole composition comes alive in a way that surprises people every time.
The label registration marking visible on the label reads "REG. IN U.S. PAT. OFF. AND CANADA" — a standard protection notice from the era indicating the design was registered in both the United States Patent Office and the equivalent Canadian authority. That dual-market registration was not automatic. It was a deliberate commercial decision by Van Slyke & Horton, reflecting a distribution footprint that crossed the border and a brand valuable enough to protect formally on both sides of it.
🎨 Collectors in the paper ephemera world have tracked this label through decades of estate sales and dealer lots. A piece of lore that circulates in tobacciana collecting circles holds that nearly every surviving example of this label turns up with damage in the same spot — the top right corner — leading some dealers to suggest that a single warehouse incident wiped out most of the original supply at once, leaving the survivors clustered around a shared condition signature. It is presented as lore because no warehouse documentation has ever surfaced to confirm it. But the pattern is real enough that experienced collectors mention it when the label comes up. The examples in this listing are New Old Stock (NOS), clean and vivid, their colors holding with full chromolithographic intensity after more than a century.
The embossed surface needs room to breathe. A deep shadowbox frame — dark navy or black mat, UV-protective glass set away from the label face — lets the raised gold border catch ambient light from different angles as the day moves. That dimensional quality is the whole point of the embossing, and flat-against-glass mounting suppresses it entirely. Give the label air between the paper and the glass and the composition rewards you differently at every hour.
The warm golds and deep reds speak directly to the palette of leather, aged paper, dark wood, and antique brass that defines a well-built study or library wall. This is not a piece that needs explanation in that context. It arrives and fits as though it was always meant to be there.
The tobacciana collector building a serious inner label collection knows that NOS embossed chromolithography with this level of color saturation and embossed detail represents a specific and increasingly sought chapter in American printing history. The Peter Schuyler brand has genuine depth — a documented founding date, a named printer, a historical figure with a remarkable biography — and that depth matters to a collection that is built around provenance as much as aesthetics.
🎁 The paper ephemera enthusiast who appreciates early American commercial art will recognize immediately what Schmidt Lithograph was doing here. This is stone chromolithography produced at the height of the craft, by a major house, for a brand that took its design seriously enough to register it in two countries. The embossed gold border is not decoration. It is a demonstration of technical capability that the printing house was justifiably proud of.
The historian and early Americana devotee will find something else entirely: a small artifact from the era when Albany was reinventing itself as an industrial and commercial city, when a tobacconist named Van Slyke was building something from a storefront at 377 Broadway into a factory town operation in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, and when the face of the man who stood in Queen Anne's court in 1710 was looking out from cigar boxes in shops across the northeastern United States. That is a lot of American history in a 6 x 4.75-inch piece of embossed paper.
This is an antique inner cigar box label produced for G.W. Van Slyke & Horton of Albany, New York, under their Peter Schuyler brand name "Odd Moments." The company was founded in 1867 by George Washington Van Slyke and restructured with partner Wallace Horton in 1880. The Peter Schuyler brand was their principal product beginning around 1885, and production under that name is documented from 1889. The label was printed by the Schmidt Lithograph Company of San Francisco, California, using stone chromolithography with embossed gold detailing, and measures approximately 6 x 4.75 inches.
The Peter Schuyler brand was introduced by G.W. Van Slyke & Horton around 1885 to 1889, and the brand remained in active production and advertising well into the 1950s. Labels of this embossed chromolithographic format were most commonly produced between the 1889 founding of the brand and the 1930s, consistent with the height of the stone lithography era for cigar labels. The "REG. IN U.S. PAT. OFF. AND CANADA" notice visible on the label is a standard dual-market registration marking from that period, indicating the design was formally protected in both the United States Patent Office and its Canadian counterpart. Competing collector listings consistently date this specific Odd Moments embossed format to the 1900s–1920s.
Pieter Schuyler (September 17, 1657 – February 19, 1724) was the first mayor of Albany, New York, when the city was incorporated in 1686, and simultaneously served as ex officio chairman of the board of commissioners for Indian affairs. He was one of the most consequential figures in early colonial New York history — in 1710, he personally escorted four Iroquois leaders to London where they received an audience with Queen Anne, a diplomatic mission that shaped colonial policy in the northeastern territories for years afterward. Van Slyke & Horton chose his name and portrait for their principal brand because he was exactly the kind of historical figure that telegraphed quality, Albany civic pride, and legitimate heritage to a cigar-buying public that respected those associations.
New Old Stock (NOS) means the label was produced commercially, held in original manufacturer or distributor stock, and never applied to a cigar box. It reached this point without the handling, moisture exposure, or adhesive damage that applied labels typically accumulate. For a chromolithographic cigar label, NOS condition is significant because the color saturation, the embossed gold detailing, and the integrity of the paper surface are preserved as they left the press. Labels that were actually applied to boxes frequently show tearing, glue residue, edge damage, or fading from the box construction process itself.
The embossed surface of a label like this requires space between the paper face and the glass — a deep shadowbox frame rather than a flush-mounted frame against a backing board. Flat-against-glass mounting physically compresses the raised embossing and suppresses the dimensional effect that makes the gold border visible under angled light. A single light source coming in from one side will make the raised gold ring catch and separate from the flat-printed surface in a way that is not visible under flat overhead lighting. UV-protective glass is recommended to prevent color fading over long display periods, and a dark mat — navy, black, or deep tobacco-brown — maximizes contrast with the cream field and gold lettering.
The Schmidt Lithograph Company of San Francisco was one of the significant American commercial lithographic houses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The firm printed for cigar manufacturers and other commercial clients across the country during the peak era of stone chromolithography, when a major printing house brought multi-stone registration, embossing capability, and a roster of skilled commercial artists to the production of labels that museums and art institutes now collect seriously. Knowing the printer on a cigar label matters to collectors and researchers because it places the piece within a specific production tradition, allows comparison with other Schmidt-printed labels, and confirms that the design and embossing work were done by a house with the technical capability to produce this quality of output.
Store flat and horizontally, away from direct light, humidity fluctuation, and heat sources. Acid-free archival sleeves or interleaving tissue are appropriate for storage outside a frame. Handle by the edges only, as skin oils accelerate deterioration of the paper surface and can affect the chromolithographic inks over time. For display, UV-protective glass and a sealed frame environment that limits dust and atmospheric exposure will preserve the label's condition for decades. Do not attempt to clean the surface — the embossed gold areas in particular are susceptible to abrasion, and any cleaning attempt risks removing color or flattening the raised detail permanently.
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