Everything authentic. Nothing reproduced. 🏛️ Vintage and Antique Gifts is a multi-channel...
Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
Vintage and Antique Gifts
Couldn't load pickup availability
Size: 8.75 x 6 inches
🌿 Two initials, an ampersand and a victor's crown. This embossed cigar label carries nothing but the interlaced monogram N&H inside a gold laurel wreath, crossed by two feathered shafts and tied with a ribbon bow, floating in a soft green haze on cream paper. It dates from the 1910s, near the end of the golden age when American cigar makers dressed their boxes in gold and raised relief, and the laurel around those letters is a symbol of honor that reaches back through Roman triumphs to the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne.
The label measures 8.75 x 6 inches, a wide cream sheet with the whole design gathered in the center. A soft green halo, shaded in fine dots, surrounds a pale circle. Inside it the letters N and H interlace into a single monogram, filled in pale green with raised gold outlines and beaded detailing, with a small ampersand tucked into the lower middle. A laurel wreath of gold-edged green leaves wraps around the monogram and is tied at the bottom with a looping gold ribbon bow. Behind the wreath two gold shafts cross, each ending in a feathered plume at the top and a banded, pointed tip at the bottom. The gold is embossed, raised up from the paper, and on the back the plain cream sheet shows the monogram, wreath and shafts pressed through in reverse. Its size is close to the 6 x 9 inch standard collectors give for an inner label, the label pasted inside a cigar box lid.
The wooden cigar box was a creation of the tax man. The Revenue Act of 1864 required cigars to be packed in "boxes or bundles," and after cigar makers found ways around it, the laws of 1865 required wooden boxes holding 25, 50, 100 or 250 cigars, a standard package that gave federal agents a place to fix the tax stamp. With every box built to the same pattern, makers turned the box itself into advertising, with an inner label inside the lid, an outer label on top, edging strips along the raw wood, nail tags and flaps.
Competition for that space was enormous. More than 1.5 million cigar brands appeared in the United States between 1870 and 1920, and roughly 80 percent of their labels came from seven printers: George Schlegel, O. L. Schwencke, Schmidt & Co., Witsch & Schmitt, Schumacher & Ettlinger and F. Heppenheimer's Sons in lower Manhattan, and Moehle Litho in Brooklyn, New York.
A top-quality cigar label could run through the press a dozen times, one pass for each color. After 1890 the finest labels made extra trips for embossing and gilding. The embossing die pushed the design up into relief, which is why the back of this label shows the wreath and letters in reverse, and the gold was bronze powder brushed on and polished with a buffing wheel of the kind found at a shoe-shine stand. A label like this one, with its green shading and raised gold wreath, belongs to that last and most elaborate stage of the craft.
The wreath around these initials has one of the oldest stories in Western art. In Greek myth, Eros made the god Apollo fall in love with the nymph Daphne. Apollo pursued her until she begged to be freed and was turned into a laurel tree, and Apollo made a wreath from its branches to honor her, tying the laurel forever to poetry and to victory. Wreaths crowned the winners of the great Greek games, and in Rome a laurel wreath crowned a victorious general in his triumph. The idea never went away. A poet laureate is a laurel-crowned poet, "resting on your laurels" means living off old victories, and the laurel wreath became a standard motif in architecture, furniture and textiles, and on the embossed paper of a cigar box.
Cigar labels have long since crossed from the tobacco shop into the museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art keeps a Louis C. Wagner & Co. sample book of cigar labels in its collection, a printer's own record of the designs it offered. Most of the artists who drew cigar labels remain unknown, which leaves the labels themselves as the main record of their work.
The age of the gilded cigar label ended quickly. After 1920 the cigarette took over the market, labels became plainer and less varied, and about four out of five American cigar factories shut within ten years. The embossed monograms and gold wreaths of the 1910s were not made again in the same way.
The label prints only the interlaced initials N and H with an ampersand, with no name spelled out anywhere on the front or back.
8.75 x 6 inches.
It dates from the 1910s.
The monogram, wreath and shafts were embossed, pressed up from behind, so the back carries the same design as a raised impression.
The standard method for American cigar labels after 1890 was bronze powder polished on a buffing wheel rather than gold leaf.
Victory and honor. It goes back to Apollo's laurel in Greek myth, the crowns of ancient games and the triumphs of Roman generals.
Items from Vetted Pro Collectors
Shipping for items offered by vetted Pro Collectors is determined at checkout. All Pro Collector listings are reviewed to ensure fair, reasonable shipping practices.
For full details, please refer to our Shipping Policy.
Take your time — you've got a full six months. If a piece isn't right for you, send it back the way it reached you and we're good.
In the first 30 days your money goes straight back the way you paid. After that it's store credit, so you can put it toward something you'd rather have.
Return shipping we sort out between us, case by case. I don't make this difficult.
If something arrives damaged, or it isn't what I said it was, send me a photo within 48 hours and I'll make it right.
Email info@vintageantiquesgifts.com or call 802-356-9872 — that's me answering, not a call center.
The only things I can't take back are custom or special-order pieces and gift cards.
