Vintage Quality 5 Cigar Label Gold Embossed Round Paper Tobacco Advertising Seal NOS Cigar Store Tobacciana 🚬

Size: 1.25 inches ~ New old stock, never applied. They vary a little one to the next.

🔴 Embossed Paper That Thinks It's a Coin

This little red and gold disc is an embossed paper cigar label. Folks ask me all the time whether it's tin, brass, celluloid or fiber, and I understand why - it plays the part of a coin so well that everybody assumes it's metal. It's paper, pressed hard. A red field with a gold rim, and QUALITY across the top, a big 5¢ dead center and CIGAR along the bottom, all standing right up off the surface in gold-outlined white letters you can feel under a fingertip.

Turn it over and the back is plain cream paper with the 5¢ and the rim showing through in reverse - mirror-flipped from all that pressure on the front. Push hard enough on one side of a sheet of paper and the other side remembers it too.

🚬 "What This Country Needs Is a Good Five-Cent Cigar"

This seal comes out of the nickel-cigar days, when five cents bought a smoke a man could brag about, and a cigar maker who could honestly print QUALITY over that price had his whole sales pitch in two words.

The most famous line ever spoken about a nickel cigar came from the top of the United States Senate. Thomas Riley Marshall of Columbia City, Indiana - governor of Indiana from 1909 to 1913 and Woodrow Wilson's vice president from 1913 to 1921 - was presiding one day while Senator Joseph Bristow of Kansas went down a long list of everything "this country needs." Marshall, the story goes, leaned over to Henry Rose, the assistant secretary of the Senate, and whispered: "Bristow hasn't hit it yet. What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."

You'll see that quip dated 1917 or 1920, but it was already in the papers by February 1914, in Fred C. Kelly's syndicated column. And here's my favorite part. Kelly wrote that spring that the makers of five-cent cigars had started bombarding the vice president with sample boxes, and after working his way through a great many of them, Marshall announced: "The country's greatest need still exists." One later telling has him receiving twenty thousand nickel cigars from grateful manufacturers. Back home in Indiana they'll tell you he borrowed the line in the first place - from Kin Hubbard's cartoon philosopher Abe Martin, of whom Marshall was a big fan.

✨ Where the Gold Comes From

Cigar labels were already the fanciest printing most folks ever held, and around 1890 the printers added more trips through the press just to emboss and gild them. The gold was usually bronze powder, buffed on with a wheel a lot like a shoe-shine buffer. That's the same trick that gives this little seal its raised letters and that warm gold rim.

And nickel cigars were serious business. The sixty hand-rollers at Powell & Goldstein in Oneida, New York, a factory that ran from 1870 to 1926, made exactly two cigars: a five-center they sold as Factory 370, and a ten-center called Napoleon. A seal like this one told a customer at a glance which kind of cigar he was buying.

🏆 Hard to Find, and Going Fast

This is one of the most popular little pieces in my shop, and I think that red-and-gold color is a big reason why - it pops on a shelf, in a frame, or tucked in with a cigar box collection. It's also a rare one. I haven't seen another offered anywhere, and I'm down to my last handful. Once they're gone, they're gone.