Antique Thor God of Thunder Cigar Label ⚡ Gold Embossed Litho, Heywood Strasser & Voigt NY

Size: 4.5 x 4.5 inches ~ unused, with a trimmed corner. They vary a little one to the next.

⚡ A Norse Thunder God, Guarding a Cigar Box

This is an antique THOR cigar box label, printed by Heywood, Strasser & Voigt Litho. Co. of New York, and it does not hold back. A crowned, golden-bearded Thor stares straight out at you, flaming crown blazing, a red cape snapping over one shoulder, and gold-embossed lightning bolts breaking across a stormy dark sky behind him. "THOR" arcs across the top in raised gold lettering striped in red and black, and the printer's own imprint — HEYWOOD, STRASSER & VOIGT LITHO. CO. N.Y. — sits quietly along the base of the design. It's the squared, clipped-corner shape of a cigar box's outer label, 4½ x 4½ inches, and the reverse is plain cream stock with the whole design pressed through it in relief — you can trace the crown and the bolts with your finger on the back. These never got glued onto a box, which is why the gold still has this much snap to it.

👑 A King's Crown Instead of a Hammer

Thor is Norse mythology's god of thunder, and this label leans into that hard — gold lightning bolts fracture the sky on every side of him. What I like is that the artist skipped the hammer everyone expects and put a flaming crown on him instead, a bit of turn-of-the-century license that dresses him up as royalty rather than just muscle. It works. He looks like he owns the cigar box, not just endorses it.

🏭 Printed by One of New York's Best

Heywood, Strasser & Voigt Litho. Co. worked out of New York from 1890 to 1919, and that span is the window this label was printed in. Antique Trader ranks the firm in the top tier of cigar-label lithographers, right alongside American Lithographic, Heppenheimer & Maurer, Krueger & Braun, Louis E. Neuman and George Schlegel. That's real company to keep. The Metropolitan Museum of Art even holds one of the firm's honor buttons.

They had no shortage of customers. By 1895 there were something like 42,000 cigar factories across the United States, most of them small shops, and every one of them needed a box and a label to sell from. The label was the advertising. A cigar sat in its box on the counter, and the picture on the lid did the talking. That's why the big houses put this much gold and embossing into a label the size of your palm. How many of them survived? The Winterthur Museum in Delaware keeps the John and Carolyn Grossman Collection, and it holds close to 85,000 cigar box labels on its own.

🗽 From Cigar Boxes to Liberty Bonds

Here's the part of this printer's story I like best. When the country went to war in 1917, Heywood, Strasser & Voigt turned the same stones and presses toward the war effort, and suddenly the artists had names on the sheet. Joseph Pennell drew two Liberty Bond posters the firm printed: "Provide the Sinews of War," a shipyard full of cranes and rigging, and the Fourth Liberty Loan's "That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth," with the Statue of Liberty wrecked and New York burning behind her. Charles Livingston Bull drew their United States Food Administration poster "Save the Products of the Land — Eat More Fish, They Feed Themselves," and L. N. Britton drew another Food Administration sheet for them. Edmund M. Ashe drew "After the Welcome Home — A Job!" for the Employment Service of the Department of Labor, and the firm printed that one too. The Library of Congress holds these posters today, and the Detroit Institute of Arts has the Pennell shipyard. Same presses, same New York shop that made Thor.