Vintage 1910s Two Homers Cigar Band Homing Pigeon Lithograph Tobacco Label Scalloped Cigar Ephemera 🚬

From the A. J. Golden stock, Pennsylvania.

These bands came from the A. J. Golden cigar operation in Pennsylvania — the owner's record of the stock, not a mark printed on the band itself.

A cigar band is the smallest piece of a brand's printing and often the only part a smoker kept. Collecting them has its own name, vitolphilia, and its own following. The homing pigeon on this one is doing ordinary period work: a fast, loyal, unmistakable bird carrying a promise that the smoker will come back to the brand — which is what “they always come back” is there to say.

Antique Two Homers cigar band, New Old Stock — never wrapped around a cigar, never used.

The band is printed on a warm yellow-gold field with a cream border, cut in the classic narrow cigar-band shape with a notched tab at each end. "TWO HOMERS" arches in black across the top over an illustration of two homing pigeons standing side by side, and the slogan "THEY ALWAYS COME BACK" is printed twice, once to each side of the birds. The back is plain and unprinted, exactly as it left the press.

It measures 2¾ inches by ¾ inches.

Nothing on the band names a maker, a town or a date, so none is claimed here.