Antique 1930s Cornwall Arms Embossed Cigar Label Small 🚬 Philadelphia, PA

Who Made Cornwall Arms Cigars? 🎩 Antique 1930s Embossed Cigar Label, the Small One: "Perfection in Every Puff"

Size: 5 1/2" x 2 1/2" ~ Slight flaw bottom left corner, see pictures.

🎩 CORNWALL ARMS in tall gold capitals, every letter thrown forward off a hatched blue shadow so the name stands right up off the paper, and under it, PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF. This is the small label from the Cornwall Arms family, gold embossed, never put on a box, and it's a little beauty.

🔍 What's On It

Two lines and nothing else: CORNWALL ARMS and PERFECTION IN EVERY PUFF, inside a plain gold rule on a soft blue-gray ground. No maker, no city and no factory number on this little one, just the brand and its promise. Turn it over and you can read the whole label backwards in the paper. That's die embossing: the sheet went through a press between a raised die and a recessed one, and it took the shape for good. Gold ink is cheap by comparison. A die cut for one brand and a second trip through the press is what made a nickel cigar feel like a luxury in your hand.

🏷️ The Cornwall Arms Story

Cornwall Arms didn't start with a cigar maker. The tobacco trade's register shows the name entered on September 18, 1929, by the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn itself, for all tobacco products. Label printers registered handsome names like this and sold the labels to whatever cigar man wanted them. This one ended up with Harold Levy of Philadelphia, who had the title and design registered in his own name. Later the brand also belonged to A. J. Golden, a cigar man in Baltimore and then Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia was a natural home for a brand like this. Lancaster County, an hour or so west, was one of the great tobacco counties of the country, and by 1859 it alone was growing sixty-five percent of Pennsylvania's crop, the leaf the city's cigar makers rolled.

And the cigars sold. Peoples Drug Stores in Washington ran Cornwall Arms at a nickel apiece in 1934, and in 1943 a box of fifty went for $1.95. "Arms," by the way, is doing deliberate work in that name: not Cornwall Cigars or Cornwall Select, but Cornwall Arms, a coat of arms, borrowed old-world pedigree for a five-cent smoke.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

The 1930s. Cornwall Arms was only registered in September 1929, and by 1934 it was a nickel cigar in the Washington drugstore ads, right in the Depression years when the five-cent cigar took over the counter. That makes it a 1930s label, not an early 1900s one.

🖼️ Display

Small enough for a little shadowbox where the embossing can throw a shadow. Collectors of cigar bands and labels, the International Seal, Label and Cigar Band Society crowd included, like the small inner labels for exactly that reason. 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.