Vintage 1940s - 1950s Embossed Cigar Label 🎭 Irvin S. Cobb Yorkana Cigar Co. Duke of Paducah Inner Lid Art

Irvin S. Cobb Cigar Label 🎩 The Duke of Paducah, Yorkana Cigar Co., York, Pa.

Size: 8 1/2" x 7 1/2"

Irvin S. Cobb in his brown suit and high white collar, his name arched over him in raised, gold-edged red letters, his signature at his shoulder and the Yorkana Cigar Co. of York, Pa. on the red banner at the foot. Never used - the whole design is pressed right through to the back. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🎩 Who Was Irvin S. Cobb?

For a good stretch, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was just about the most famous funny man in America. Born in Paducah, Kentucky, on June 23, 1876, he went to work at the Paducah Daily News at seventeen and was the youngest managing editor in the country at nineteen. After he covered the Russian-Japanese peace talks in 1905, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World hired him, and he became the highest-paid staff reporter in the United States. He covered the First World War, wrote more than 60 books and 300 short stories - his Judge Priest stories became two John Ford pictures, Judge Priest with Will Rogers in 1934 and The Sun Shines Bright in 1953 - and he hosted the Academy Awards in 1935. Folks called him the Duke of Paducah. And he looked made for a cigar box: round, bushy-browed, triple-chinned, with a cigar always hanging from his mouth.

🚬 A Cigar, a Dahlia and a Bass Bait

The cigar came early. The brand's own trademark papers give 1916 as the first year the name went on cigars. By July 29, 1929, The New York Times counted Cobb's name on a cigar, a dahlia, a Missouri corn cob pipe, a race horse, a bass bait, a hunting shirt, an Oregon canyon, a Texas street and a pointer dog - and that April Paducah had opened the Irvin Cobb Hotel, the biggest and fanciest in western Kentucky. The portrait on this label is credited "From Photo by Pirie MacDonald," the New York portraitist who billed himself the Photographer of Men.

🔎 When This One Was Printed

Here's the fun detective bit. Under the portrait it reads REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. NO. 435,331. That's the federal trademark for this very portrait, name and signature, and it wasn't registered until December 16, 1947. It was filed that March by W. P. Allen of Paducah, doing business as the Irvin S. Cobb Cigar Co., and the papers note that the man pictured is the well-known American author and humorist, now deceased. Cobb had died in New York on March 11, 1944, and gone home to Paducah's Oak Grove Cemetery under a stone that says simply "Back Home." So this sheet came off the press after the war, with the brand in his hometown's hands and Yorkana of York still named on the banner. The registration was renewed in 1967 and finally lapsed in 1988.

🏭 York County, Cigar Country

York County, Pennsylvania, rolled cigars by the hundreds of millions. In 1907 the United Cigar Manufacturing Company built a factory in York alone, one of nineteen it ran across New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, turning out 400 million cigars a year between them. Yorkana itself is a little York County borough that took its name around 1880 and did a good cigar trade of its own, and the Yorkana Cigar Co. put out other brands besides this one - Lyra and El Tutor among them. Old-timers in York County tobacco circles tell how whole families worked the leaf at home, rolling and banding at the kitchen table and carrying the bundles to the factory at the end of the week, and how small makers came and went within a generation.

Handsome framed in a den or a library, maybe next to one of his books.