Antique Embossed Prudential Cigar Label 🚬 ~ Gold Detailing, 1900s-1920s

Who Made Prudential Cigars? 🚬 Prudential Cigar: A Gold Embossed Inner Label

Size: 9" x 7"

An antique Prudential embossed cigar label from the 1900s to the 1920s! This is a very neat cigar label and isn't very common. Great colors and embossing!

PRUDENTIAL is spelled out in big gold-shaded letters on a scrolled banner across an airbrushed oval. Pinned to the top of the banner is a gold coin with a classical profile head ringed by stars, pressed into a rosette with ribbons trailing down behind, like a first-prize ribbon at the fair. CIGAR sits below, and a second PRUDENTIAL runs along the bottom of the sheet. Flip it over and the back is blank, but the embossing is so deep you can read PRUDENTIAL backwards right through the paper.

Some may show a little corner wear. It would never show once the label is framed, but have a look at the pictures and the video and decide for yourself.

✨ Gold, Stone and a 38-Ton Press

It's an amazing gold embossed label. The raised parts of labels like this one were highlighted with 22-karat gold or bronze leaf. By 1892 lithographers were stamping them with precision-machined dies in 38-ton presses, and the colors came off as many as 25 separate Bavarian limestones, each one 3 to 4 inches thick and weighing up to 600 pounds. A single label could take a dozen skilled specialists a month to create and cost upwards of $6,000 in the dollars of the day.

Picture 100-year-old antique advertising up on your wall as home decor, in whichever room suits it!

📦 Why Every Cigar Box Had One

In 1865 a federal law required all cigars, foreign or domestic, to be packed in wooden boxes of 25, 50, 100 or 250. That put a box in front of every smoker in America, and the inside of the lid became a brand's billboard. Tony Hyman, the cigar box historian, wrote in Cigar Aficionado that more than 1.5 million brands of U.S. cigars appeared and disappeared between 1870 and 1920, from about 150,000 factories, and that colorful inside labels became essential to make a brand stand out. After 1920 photoengraving and four-color presses arrived just as fully 80 percent of American cigar factories were closing, and the labels were never as grand again.

Cigar labels are antique advertising at its best. The graphics that lithography and embossing could produce are something modern printing simply can't reproduce, and sadly it was mostly a lost art once the 1920s were over. To me they are a reminder of a bygone era, and I still think the lithography behind them is unequalled today. Museums and art institutes keep galleries devoted to them, and more and more collectors are looking for them in order to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries then they will be very difficult to acquire.

My photos really don't do it justice. Labels like these had to be printed on heavy paper stock, and that keeps them vibrant and new looking for a long, long time.

This item has reached full antique status.

🎨 The Artists

Most of the artists behind these were very good, but they were desperate for work in that era, were paid very little and got no recognition for what they made. Sadly, most of them will remain unknown, but we can keep their art alive forever.