Vintage 1940s Manila Blunts Cigar Band 🚬 Gilt Gold Embossed Tobacco Label NOS

Who Smoked Manila Blunts? 🚬 A Vintage 1940s Manila Blunts Gilt Cigar Band, MADE IN U.S.A.

Size: 2 3/4" x 1/2" ~ New Old Stock (NOS)

This little Manila Blunts cigar band is a flat, unused band that never went around a cigar. MANILA BLUNTS is printed in cream letters on a deep maroon panel in the middle, with cream speed lines streaking out to each side and MADE IN U.S.A. on both wings, all on a bright gold embossed ground with a dotted border pressed into the paper. One end is a plain white tab, where the cigar roller put the dab of glue. Turn it over and you can see the whole embossing die from the back, every little raised dot of the border.

🗺️ The Manila Name

The word Manila on a cigar was never an accident. Tobacco from around Manila carried real romance in the Western market, and trade lore holds that at the turn of the twentieth century fine Manila leaf was spoken of in the same breath as Cuban, with old-timers still telling the story that it sometimes fetched more than its Caribbean rival. A brand called Manila Blunts was reaching straight for that.

The best-known Manila cigar house was the Alhambra Cigar & Cigarette Manufacturing Company, which traced its beginnings to the late 1800s and set up its plant and offices on Tayuman Street in the Tondo district of Manila in 1912. Alhambra's hand-rolled cigars were at their most popular in the first three decades of the twentieth century and sold at home and abroad.

🏙️ An Indianapolis Cigar With a Manila Name

Here's the twist: Manila Blunts was an Indianapolis brand. The House of Crane, a cigar wholesaler on South Meridian Street whose slogan was "If it comes from The House of Crane it's a good cigar," registered the name with the trade's registration bureau in 1916, and in 1925 took out a federal registration claiming use since August 14, 1917. For the next twenty-five years the cigars were rolled in Manila and sold here as imports. In 1922 Peoples drugstores in Washington advertised Manila Blunts as a large size, genuine Manila cigar, long filler and hand made, packed in ribbon-tied bundles of six at 6 for 20 cents. The 1927 trade directory lists them as made at the La Yebana factory in Manila with the House of Crane as agent, and by 1938 the Alhambra company was packing them in boxes of 100 with U.S. revenue stamps already on. In 1940 Crane was still advertising The Genuine Manila Blunts at 2 for 5 cents.

Then the war cut Manila off. On January 31, 1942, The Tobacco Leaf ran the headline "Crane's Manila Cigars Will Be Made in U.S.A.," and Paul and Richard Crane said the brands that had always been made in Manila, Manila Blunts among them, would be made in this country from then on. That's the reason this band says MADE IN U.S.A. twice, and it's why I date it to the 1940s - before 1942 these cigars were sold as imports, and a band shouting MADE IN U.S.A. would have said the opposite. In occupied Manila the next year, a letter to The Tribune complained that Manila Blunts couldn't be had there at all. The House of Crane's own building on Meridian Street, where cigars were wholesaled for nearly 70 years, came down in 1990, but its front was kept and is part of Circle Centre today.

After the war the name went back to Manila. By 1953 the Manila yearbooks list Manila Blunts as Alhambra's own brand, and its old corporation wound up in 1962 and a new company, Alhambra Industries, Inc., was formed to handle its business, and it was Alhambra that filed MANILA BLUNTS as a U.S. trademark in November 1961, for Manila-made cigars it had been selling into this country since that October. The registration came through in 1963 and ran until 1987. This band isn't one of those - it says MADE IN U.S.A. on both ends.

✨ Gold on a Throwaway Ring

Look closely and you can read the craft in it. The band was printed on a gold ground and then run under a steel die that pressed the dotted border and panels up into relief. The shine on bands and labels like this came from 22-karat gold or bronze leaf, and on American work it was generally bronze. It is a lot of trouble to go to for something a smoker would slip off and drop in the ashtray, and that is the whole point: the band was the cigar's first advertisement.

📚 Cigar Band Legends and Vitolphilia

Nobody agrees on where the cigar band came from, and the legends are half the fun. One story says Catherine the Great of Russia had her cigars wrapped in silk so they would not stain her fingers, and her court copied her. Another says paper bands were put on cigars shipped to England to keep gentlemen's white gloves clean. The historians give the credit to a Dutch-born cigar maker in Cuba named Gustave Bock, who in the 1830s put paper rings with his signature on every cigar he exported to Europe, and within about twenty years nearly every Havana cigar going abroad wore one.

By 1900 an estimated four out of five American men smoked cigars, and something like 2 billion cigar bands were sold in the United States that year alone. Kids collected them, scrapbookers turned them into collage art, and some cigar makers even used their bands like trading stamps, with catalogs of premiums you could get for a few hundred or a few thousand bands. Collecting them has a name, vitolphilia, and the record holder, American collector Joe Hruby, was in the Guinness Book of World Records with more than 165,000 different bands, a number that had passed 221,000 by 1999.

🖼️ Display

Float-mount it between glass so the gold catches the light and the embossing throws its own little shadow, or build a small framed grid of cigar bands and let this one sit in the middle. It is a fun gift for a cigar smoker, a tobacciana collector or anybody who loves old paper. The supply is finite, and once these last unused bands are gone into collections, they'll be very difficult to acquire.