Antique 1920s Wizard Gold Embossed Cigar Label 🐈‍⬛ Black Cat & Magic

Who Was the Wizard on the Cigar Label? 🪄 A Wizard Turning Leaf Into Cigars

Size: 10" x 6 1/2" ~ little to no wear.

Every cigar maker liked to think there was a little magic in turning a bale of cured leaf into a box of fine smokes. This label makes it literal. An old wizard in spectacles and a tall peaked hat points his wand at two corded bales of tobacco, and a plume of golden leaves lifts out of them, darkening as it climbs until the leaves at the tip have become cigars. A black cat arches its back at his feet. Across the top, in raised gold letters, one word: WIZARD. This is an antique inner cigar box label, the big showpiece pasted inside the lid, and the Cigar Label Price Guide lists the Wizard brand in both inner and outer sizes as a magician and black cat raising tobacco from bales.

🖼️ What the Label Shows

The wizard stands at right in a long robe with a dragon climbing the front, a peaked hat with ribbons streaming behind him, a flowing beard and round spectacles. One hand holds out a slender wand and the other spreads over two tied bales on the lawn, and between them stands the black cat, back arched and tail up. WIZARD runs across the upper left, and the picture floats in a soft vignette on a wide sheet that carries no other printing.

🐈‍⬛ The Black Cat

A wizard needs a familiar, and the black cat has played that part for centuries. Black cats are a symbol of Halloween and witchcraft, and across much of Europe they were long considered bad luck. Elsewhere the same animal is a charm. In British folklore a black cat means good luck, and Scottish tradition holds that a black cat arriving at a new home brings prosperity. Sailors wanted a black ship's cat for a lucky voyage, and fishermen's wives kept them to protect their husbands at sea. In Japan black cats are lucky too. On a cigar label the cat does both jobs at once, a little spooky and a little lucky.

📦 Why Cigar Boxes Carried Labels Like This

In 1865 the federal government rewrote its cigar tax laws and required all cigars to be packed in boxes of 25, 50, 100, 250 or 500, with new tax stamps to match. A box needed a brand, and a brand needed a label. Around the same time the steam press made color label lithography economical for the first time, and from 1868 the law also demanded the factory's identification and a caution notice on every box. What followed was a flood. Tony Hyman's Cigar History Museum counts close to two million brands of cigars that reached American retailers, because boxes and brands were so cheap to customize that wholesalers, retailers and smokers all created their own. In 1879 an inventory at Heppenheimer & Maurer, one of the leading New York lithographic houses specializing in cigar labels, counted 25,000 registered lithographic stones and 7,000,000 cigar labels.

✨ Inner Labels and Gold Embossing

The inner label is the large one pasted inside the lid, seen when the box was opened, and it got the richest treatment. This one is embossed hard enough that the scene stands up from the paper: the letters, the wizard's sleeves and dragon, the bales, the cat and the rising leaves are all raised, with gold on the lettering and the robe. Turn the sheet over and the embossing reads in reverse across the blank back, WIZARD running backwards above the wizard, cat and bales in white relief.

Museums treat cigar labels as art too: the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe mounted "Out of the Box: The Art of the Cigar" in 2016, and the Winterthur Museum in Delaware houses the Grossman collection, cigar box labels among it. This very design made it into a museum, too: the Cincinnati Art Museum keeps a Wizard cigar box label in its print collection - the small clipped-corner outer one, with the same wizard, wand, bales and black cat - catalogued as an early 20th century color lithograph with embossing.

📅 Age

The sheet carries no printer's line and no date, so the dating comes from the people who handle these. The dealers who sell the Wizard from old cigar-factory stock put it in the 1920s - one describes both the inner and the little outer label as printed in the 1920s, another calls the inner circa 1920 - and the 1920s is where I put it too. Its deep embossing and gold carry on the look of what Hyman calls the golden age of American cigars, which he dates from 1878 to 1915, and this is some of the last of that kind of work.

🔍 Condition

New old stock: an original embossed paper label, unused and never pasted into a box. Bright color and gold, with a blank back showing the embossing in reverse. You receive one label like the one pictured.

🪄 About these

The supply is finite - nobody's embossing Wizard labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.