Antique 1930s Cornwall Arms Embossed Cigar Label 🛡️ Perfection in Every Puff, Philadelphia Inner Label NOS

Which Cornwall Is on the Cornwall Arms Cigar Label? 🛡️ Antique 1930s Cornwall Arms Embossed Cigar Box Label, Perfection in Every Puff - Harold Levy, Philadelphia

Size: 9 1/2" x 7" ~ little to no wear

Amazing gold embossed label, a big cream inner sheet. A little shield with an HL monogram over a PHILADELPHIA banner, CORNWALL ARMS in raised gold with a deep blue shadow, PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF, a second CORNWALL ARMS across the bottom, and two lines of small print that tell its whole story: TITLE AND DESIGN REGISTERED HAROLD LEVY PHILADELPHIA, PENNA., and right at the foot, CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION BROOKLYN N.Y. Never used. Yours will look just like this one.

🏷️ Harold Levy's Cigar

Cornwall Arms started out as one of the printer's own names. Consolidated Lithographing entered CORNWALL ARMS in the tobacco trade's register on September 18, 1929 - label houses liked to register a good name and then sell it to a cigar man - and this one went to Harold Levy of Philadelphia, whose name is in the registration line and whose HL is on the shield. The brand later went to A. J. Golden of Baltimore and Red Lion, Pennsylvania, and there's an AJG version of this label out there too. And the cigars really sold: a nickel apiece at Peoples Drug Stores in Washington in 1934, and fifty for $1.95 in 1943.

🔎 How Old Is It?

The 1930s. The name was only registered in 1929, Consolidated - put together in the mid-1920s when Jacob A. Voice's shop joined Wm. Steiner & Sons - printed in Brooklyn until it moved out to Long Island in the early 1950s, and by 1934 Cornwall Arms was a nickel cigar on the drugstore counters, right in the Depression years of the five-cent smoke. Cornwall Arms labels also went out to the trade in a salesman's sample book, and there's a Cornwall Arms cigar band too.

✨ How the Gold Got There

This is the inner label, the big sheet that went under the lid, so a smoker saw it every time he opened the box - and the inner sheet was the cigar maker's pride, so as a rule it got the embossing and the gold. The gold here isn't flat ink. The sheet was pressed between engraved dies so the letters stand up off the paper (turn one over and the whole design shows through backwards), and on labels like this the raised parts were highlighted with 22-karat gold or bronze leaf, an extra run through the press on top of the color printing. Consolidated knew that work from the ground up: Jacob A. Voice came to New York from Romania at the age of four and went to work at fourteen for William Steiner & Co., the lithographers, as a bronze feeder. In January 1935 Time magazine wrote him up as president of the biggest cigar-band maker in the world - about three and a half billion of the cigars made in America the year before wore Consolidated bands, and it took a 30-ton embossing machine and eleven operations to turn out even an ordinary one.

🏰 Which Cornwall?

The name might come from old Cornwall in England and its coat of arms - Kernow to the Cornish, whose own language was still spoken there into the 1770s, and a royal duchy since 1337, held by the monarch's eldest son and heir - or it might be closer to home: Pennsylvania has a Cornwall of its own, the iron-furnace town in Lebanon County, where the Cornwall Iron Furnace ran from 1742 until 1883.

🌱 Philadelphia Tobacco

As early as 1810, Tench Coxe's report on American manufactures had Philadelphia leading Pennsylvania in snuff and cigars, and after 1815, when the wheat market fell off, Lancaster County farmers - many of them Amish and Mennonite - turned to tobacco; by 1859 the county was growing sixty-five percent of the state's crop. The city's tobacco trade with the Caribbean drew Puerto Rican and Cuban cigar makers to Philadelphia, which by one estimate had some nine hundred tobacco factories by the turn of the twentieth century, and a 1912 federal report by E. H. Mathewson put Pennsylvania first in the nation in cigar making, with Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Lancaster among its centers.

Cigar labels show you what antique advertising is all about - graphics that lithography gave us and modern printing just can't reproduce. Most of the artists who drew them got paid very little and no credit, but we can keep their art alive. My pictures seriously don't do it justice. The supply is finite - nobody's embossing Cornwall Arms labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.