Vintage 1950s-60s Winter's Havana Specials Cigar Band 🚬 J.C. Winter Co. Red Lion Pennsylvania Tobacciana Cigar Label

Remember Winter's Havana Specials Cigars? 🚬 Winter's Havana Specials Cigar Band

Size: 2 3/4" x 3/4"

I love how sharp this little band is, and it has never been on a cigar: the glue tab at the end, where the roller dabbed on the paste, is still clean.

🏭 Who Made It: J. C. Winter & Co. of Red Lion

The name on the band belongs to J. C. Winter & Co. of Red Lion, Pennsylvania, a little borough in York County that built itself on cigars. J. C. Winter was born in 1888 and started making cigars in Red Lion around 1910 or 1911, and by the end of the First World War his firm was running as many as 32 factories. It incorporated in 1929, with his sister Amelia C. Winter as treasurer, and the United States Tobacco Journal already counted it among the biggest houses in Red Lion back in 1925. In June 1949 Esquire ran a mail-order ad offering "J.C. Winter's Specials" at $3.00 for a box of 50, listed with its blended Havana domestics.

And here's the twist in that one word on the band. The Federal Trade Commission had already had the firm agree, in 1935, to stop calling its filler "Havana". Then came the Cuban embargo, and on August 3, 1964 the FTC issued a consent order naming the Winter company and its brand, "Winters Havana Special", and ordering it to stop putting the word Havana on cigars that weren't made entirely of Cuban tobacco. A book two years later still listed "Winters Havana Specials" among the names cigar makers had been told to drop. So the brand shows up in print from 1949 right up to that order, and that's where I'd put this band: the 1950s or early '60s, while the word on its face was still allowed.

🌴 What "Havana" Meant

The word Havana on a band pointed straight at Cuba, and that is where the cigar band was born. Cigar historians credit Gustave Bock, a Dutch-born cigar maker working in Cuba, with inventing it in the 1830s, when he had paper rings with his signature put on every cigar he shipped to Europe. Within twenty years almost every cigar exported from Havana wore a band.

Of course, there are better stories. Legend has it that Catherine the Great of Russia smoked her cigars wrapped in silk so they would not stain her fingers, and that her court started wrapping theirs to copy her. Another tale says bands were put on the cigars sent to England to keep the gentlemen's white gloves clean. Nobody has ever proved either one, but I like them both.

📦 Two Billion a Year

By 1900 Americans were going through something like 2 billion cigar bands a year. They cost about 70 cents a thousand to print, which made them one of the cheapest ways for a cigar maker to build a brand. The printer shipped them precut in bundles of 100, and each one was put on by hand as one of the last steps in making the cigar. At least one maker even used its bands like trading stamps, with a whole catalog of prizes you could get for enough of them. From the 1920s on, cheap four-color printing and the rise of the cigarette cut the number of cigar makers way down, and bands got plainer.

Kids saved them, scrapbookers pasted them into collages, and collecting them has its own name now, vitolphilia, with its own club, the International Label, Seal and Cigar Band Society. The record belongs to an American collector named Joe Hruby, who made the Guinness Book of World Records with more than 165,000 different bands and had over 221,000 by 1999. And in Britain it was considered bad manners to leave the band on while you smoked, a bit like bragging about the brand.

It's a sharp little piece for a tobacciana collection, a frame of cigar bands, or anybody named Winter.