Antique Selector Cigar Box Label 🚬 J.M. Martinez Co. American Lithographic New York 1900s - 1920s Embossed Tobacco Ephemera

Selector Cigar Box Label 🎩 J.M. Martinez Co., Tampa · American Lithographic Co., New York · About 1905

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

The Selector himself - white suit, straw hat, a big hand of cured leaf held out like he's daring you to find a bad one, with the tobacco fields and drying barns behind him. This is the square outer label, embossed deep enough that the whole picture shows up backwards on the back - new old stock, never used. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🌴 Made in Tampa

J.M. Martinez Co. was a Tampa cigar house. The University of South Florida's Osterweil Collection of Tampa cigar labels has this very Selector label, credited to the J.M. Martinez Company and dated around 1905, along with the company's own J.M. Martinez label, which says it plain: "Made in Tampa by Cuban Cigar Makers." The same collection has a third label of theirs, M & W. That's Tampa in its cigar glory years - Cuban and Spanish cigar makers rolling by hand in the factories of Ybor City and West Tampa, and Tampa on its way to calling itself Cigar City. (Not to be confused with Vicente Martínez Ybor, who started Ybor City itself in 1885 - different Martinez.)

In January 1904 J. M. Martinez & Co. moved into a frame cigar factory in West Tampa, at Armina Avenue and Spruce Street, owned by the Armina Cigar Co. - Hugh Macfarlane's company. Macfarlane was the Scottish-born Tampa lawyer who started West Tampa in 1892 to pull cigar factories and their workers across the river from Ybor City, and West Tampa was a city of its own back then, incorporated in 1895 and not annexed by Tampa until 1925. Three months after the move, on April 4, 1904, a fire broke out at Mugge's Spanish Ten Pin Alleys, a bowling alley at Howard Avenue and Pine Street, and ran right through West Tampa. It burned fifteen business blocks and close to two hundred tenements, panic in forty cigar factories sent men, women and children running into the streets, and five cigar factories burned. J. M. Martinez & Co. was one of the five.

A selector was a real job. In a Havana-style factory the escogedor - literally "the chooser" - was one of the most senior men in the house, sorting finished cigars by the color of the wrapper, sometimes into sixty or more shades, so every box matched. Naming your cigar after him was a promise that somebody fussy had picked these. In the Tampa factories the men actually called selectors worked a step earlier, grading the leaf by color and texture before it went to the rollers - and a hand of cured leaf is just what this fellow is holding out.

🏰 The Shield With the Key

Look at the left shield: three red towers and a gold key. That's the coat of arms of Havana, in use by 1638 - the towers are the three forts that guarded the harbor, La Fuerza, El Morro and La Punta, and the key is there because Havana was the gateway to the New World. On a Tampa cigar box that shield told you the leaf and the know-how were Cuban. The other shield is a red lion rampant on gold.

That Cuban leaf was Tampa's calling card. A clear Havana was a cigar of 100 percent Cuban-grown tobacco rolled on this side of the water, and that's what set Tampa apart. Back on the island, the farming of that tobacco had leaned on families from Spain's Canary Islands since the 1700s.

And read the fine print along the bottom: TRADE MARK RESISTERED BY J.M. MARTINEZ CO. Registered, with an S. Somebody in the print shop was having a long day, and there it is on every one.

🖨️ The Printer

The other corner reads AMERICAN LITHOGRAPHIC CO., N.Y. That firm was put together in 1892, when Joseph P. Knapp rolled up a whole row of the big label houses - Heppenheimer, George S. Harris & Sons, Donaldson Brothers, Witsch & Schmitt, Schumacher & Ettlinger and more - largely to get control of the cigar label business. It became the biggest lithographer in North America, out of a thirteen-story loft at 19th Street and Park Avenue South built in 1895, with 857 people on the payroll in 1899. In 1929 the label work went over to Consolidated Lithographing, so an American Lithographic imprint puts a label between 1892 and 1929.

A label like this went together one color at a time, and every color had its own stone. The progressive proof books the big label houses kept as their record of those color separations - American Lithographic's among them, now at RIT's Cary Graphic Arts Collection - show everyday package labels, a laxative, a face powder, a soap wrapper, running eight, nine and ten colors, and the best cigar labels often took twelve stones or more. After the colors came the embossing die, and on embossed labels the raised parts were picked out in 22-karat gold or bronze leaf.

📜 The Stories

Collector lore says American Lithographic had whole floors of German- and Austrian-trained stone men working late under gas lamps on the fussiest cigar jobs, and that the pressmen counted cigar labels as the real test of their trade, since tobacconists handled them every day and knew good printing when they saw it. Another old story is that small cigar makers would spend far more on a label than their size called for, because the label was the only salesman most of them had. And the tale told about the Selector name is that it honored the leaf man who could judge hundreds of leaves an hour by feel, color and smell alone.

Handsome framed in a den, a cigar room or anywhere you've got a soft spot for Tampa.