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Fall 1997 Volume I Issue 2 |
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Fall 1997 Volume I Issue 2 |
Gold, the world's oldest store of value, is traded at about $340 an ounce, while silver trades at about $5 an ounce. Would you believe that tin has sold for more than either of these precious metals? Well, not just any tin, of course, but tin, when finished as a tobacco pail or canister, can be worth that much. In a New York auction just a decade ago, a 5.5" tobacco pail advertising Lime Kiln Club Smoking Tobacco sold for $13,200. That's roughly $3,000 an ounce! In 1974, a Mayo's lunch box-style tin of cut plug tobacco had a price tag of $18, and in 1995, its value was around $200.
What is it about empty tobacco tins? After all, it's a utilitarian, inanimate, and unromantic object. David Burt, in his four-part study, "One Billion Cans For Tobacco," published in The Tobacco Leaf in 1946, claimed that just one year before Pearl Harbor, 43,000 tons of sheet steel were bent and soldered into about one billion tin-plated tobacco tins that stored some 90,000 tons of tobacco -
more than 95 percent of America's smoking tobacco, cigarettes, cigars, and snuff.
These tobacco tins were displayed in 15,300 cigar stores and in about 700,000 other outlets such as drug stores, grocery stores, lunch rooms, restaurants, and notion and department stores. Today, the desirability of these tins has less to do with their disappearance from the shelves and counters of those shops, and more to do with their standing as legitimate art...
