Antique 1930s Thompson’s Panatelas Gold Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Now 2 for 5¢, Brooklyn Litho

Two for a Nickel? 🚬 Antique 1930s Thompson's Panatelas Gold Embossed Cigar Label, Brooklyn Litho

Size: 8 1/2" x 7"

🚬 One word on this label is doing all the work: “now”. Across the top, in silver script on red, it reads now 2 for 5¢ — not a price, an announcement of a price cut. Somebody had a whole new label embossed, gilded and printed in Brooklyn purely to tell a shopkeeper’s customers that Thompson’s Panatelas had come down to two cigars for a nickel.

🧷 Details

Approx. 8 1/2" x 7" ~
Original embossed cigar-box label on heavy stock, unused
Printed: now 2 for 5¢ · Thompson’s PANATELAS · QUALITY MILD CIGARS, with MILD set inside a gold diamond · and a lower band repeating 2 for 5¢ — Thompson’s Panatelas — 2 for 5¢
Printer’s imprint along the bottom edge: CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION, BROOKLYN, N.Y.
The reverse is unprinted, and the embossing stands through it in reverse relief

📅 What dates it

The printer’s own name is the clock. Jacob A. Voice had run his own lithographic firm since about 1911; in 1925 he merged it with Wm. Steiner & Sons and the business took the name Consolidated Lithographing Corporation. A sheet carrying that corporate name cannot have been printed before 1925.

The banner does the rest. Through the 1920s the five-cent cigar was the working man’s smoke; when the Depression arrived and incomes fell, the nickel cigar became the industry’s standard price point. “Now 2 for 5¢” is a step below that standard — two and a half cents a cigar — and the word “now” says the brand had just gone there. That puts this sheet in the 1930s, at the sharp end of the price war that the nickel cigar started.

🏭 Consolidated Lithographing, Brooklyn

Consolidated was one of the largest paper-label printers in America, and it got that way by swallowing its rivals: Schmidt & Company, Heywood, Strasser & Voight, and the American Lithographic Company all ended up inside it. Voice himself had started at Wm. Steiner & Sons in 1903 and worked his way to owning the successor to the firm that hired him. Fortune put him and the company in its March 1933 issue, illustrated with thirteen original chromolithographs of cigar-box art — a business magazine treating label printing as a subject worth thirteen plates.

His son Sidney P. Voice was vice-president, and the cigar-band collection Sidney built is now held as an archival collection in New York. The men who ran these presses knew they were making art; it was everybody else who treated it as packaging.

🌴 Thompson’s and Tampa

I’ve always had this one down as a Tampa label, from Thompson & Co., and there’s good reason for it. That Tampa house sold its cigars under its own name — Thompson’s Tampa was one of its trademarks, alongside Empress of Cuba and Royal Palm — and its Empress of Cuba label came off the presses of the very same Consolidated Lithographing Corporation whose name runs along the bottom of this sheet.

Mark A. Thompson was a Chicago man who had been in the mail-order coffee business before he started Thompson & Co. as a mail-order cigar house in 1915. The company’s own story starts it in Key West, until hurricanes wrecked the cigar factories there, and within a few years he had moved to Tampa’s Ybor City. Tampa was the Cigar Capital of the World by then. Ybor City had grown up in the 1880s around Cuban cigar makers who moved their factories north to get out from under the tariff on Cuban cigars, and Thompson’s own brands were made with Havana tobacco. In 1923 the company put up a two-story building on Edison Avenue with space for hand-rolling cigars, a cigar vault, shipping, and even its own print shop for labels. In 1925 Thompson opened a machine plant forty miles east in Bartow, eventually running thirty cigar-making machines and close to 100,000 cigars a day, and in 1929 the company made and sold about twenty million cigars. In time it came to hold Tampa’s Mail Permit No. 1, a fitting number for a house that sold by mail from the start.

Mark Thompson died in April 1935, and his widow, Clara Ward Thompson, ran the company as president until her death in 1951, so the Thompson house was in her hands through the rest of the Depression and the war years. The company is still selling cigars by mail more than a century after he started it.

🎨 How a label like this was actually made

Chromolithography meant a separate stone for every color, hand-separated by an artist — the most ambitious cigar labels ran to as many as forty stones. The gold was a further pass: either genuine gold leaf or metallic bronzing powder dusted onto ink while it was still wet. And then the embossing, which is what you feel before you see it here — a pair of engraved brass dies, a raised male and a sunken female, registered exactly to the printed image and driven together in a press of around thirty tons.

The peak of that craft ran from the 1890s to about 1920. This sheet comes after it — a late, full-dress example of embossed gilt label work being spent on a cigar selling two for a nickel, at the moment cheap offset printing was about to end the whole tradition.

🚬 What a “panatela” is

A shape, not a blend: long, slim and lightly tapered, a thinner smoke than the fat shapes at the same price. Calling a two-for-a-nickel cigar a Panatela and a quality mild cigar is the whole marketing argument in two words — cheap, but not coarse.

❓ Questions People Ask

Who made the cigars? The sheet names the brand, Thompson’s Panatelas, and the printer, Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn. I’ve always had it down as a Thompson & Co. of Tampa brand, and the story of that house is above.

Is the gold real? Cigar-label gilding of this period was done with genuine gold leaf or with metallic bronzing powder; the label does not say which was used on this one.

Is it a reproduction? No — an original unused label on heavy period stock, with real embossing you can feel from both sides.

Does “2 for 5¢” mean it is from the 1900s? No. The five-cent cigar was still the standard into the Depression; this label announces a cut below it, and its printer’s corporate name only existed from 1925.

🏡 Good for framing, cigar and tobacciana collections, chromolithography and embossed-printing collections, Brooklyn and New York printing history, Depression-era advertising, and man-cave, bar and study walls.