Vintage 1940s Centrilla Gold Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 The Antonio Co., Tampa, FL

Size: 8.5 x 6.75 inches ~ little to no wear. New Old Stock, never applied to a box. They vary a little one to the next.

🚬 What's Printed on This Sheet

This is a Centrilla inner-lid cigar label, unused and never glued down to a box, which is exactly why the gold on it still looks wet. The centerpiece is a couple sitting together in a garden — her in a rose-pink gown with flowers in hand, him leaning in close beside her in a mustard-gold coat, with a little domed pergola glowing at the end of the path behind them. It's set inside an arched, gold-embossed frame with two oval cameos on either side, each one holding a classical figure in flowing robes, and CENTRILLA spelled out overhead in big gold letters with a dot between each one. Down in the small print it says exactly what it is: "TITLE AND DESIGN REGISTERED BY THE ANTONIO CO., TAMPA, FLA." The same sheet also carries a smaller CENTRILLA strip in green and pink lower down, the brand name doing double duty on one piece of paper.

📚 Its Twin Is in a University Collection

This exact design is cataloged in the University of South Florida's Tampa Cigar Art collection under the Centrilla name, credited to the Antonio Cigar Company, and dated to about 1940. Their own description of the scene: "a man and woman sitting in a beautiful garden." I love it when something on my shelf turns out to have a twin in a university archive - good company for a cigar box label to keep.

🌴 Cigar City

A label like this only exists because of Ybor City. Vicente Martinez Ybor had already moved his cigar business once, from Cuba to Key West in 1869, and in 1885 he moved it again, to a stretch of sandy scrubland just northeast of Tampa. He built hundreds of small houses for the Cuban and Spanish cigar workers who came with it, and a brick factory that filled a whole city block and was, the day it opened, the largest cigar factory in the world. It rolled its first clear Havana cigars - all-Cuban tobacco, the best smoke money could buy - on April 13, 1886. Italians came too, starting out as porters and doormen and working their way up to the rolling tables. Tampa annexed the neighborhood in 1887, and for decades after, the city's own nickname for itself was simply "Cigar City." From about 1900 to 1930 Ybor City was the cigar capital of the world: more than 200 factories in the 1920s, most of them in Ybor City and West Tampa, around 10,000 people at the tables, and 500 million cigars rolled in the peak year of 1929. By the time this label was printed that peak had passed, and a brand like Centrilla needed its box lid to do the selling. The Antonio Co., who registered the Centrilla title and design you see here, ran their Tampa factory at 1316 Spring Street - you can still find a 1955 photograph of the building.

📖 The Lector

One thing about those factories that still gets me: they employed a lector. A reader on a raised platform above the rolling tables, reading newspapers, political tracts and serialized novels out loud, all day, to a room full of people hand-rolling cigars — and the workers paid for it themselves, twenty-five to fifty cents a week out of their own wages. A cigar factory with its own subscription reading service, built right into the shop floor. Old-timers in Ybor City still tell how a rolling-table crew could get through whole shelves of novels that way, one chapter at a time. The owners banned the readers on November 26, 1931; 10,000 workers struck over it, the strike failed, and a radio took the lector's place for good. So by the time this Centrilla label came off the press, the readers had been gone for nine years.

🎨 How the Gold Got There

Getting a label like this printed took two separate processes stacked on top of each other. First chromolithography — as many as twenty-some colors, each one run through its own stone or plate, one color at a time. Then a second pass just for the embossing, pressing the design into relief and laying the metallic gold in with foil or bronze powder. All of that before anyone even lifted the lid of the box it was meant for.