The lithograph (Greek, lithos-stone/ grapho-write) industry was apporaching its high-water mark, creating prints and posters using up to 22 separate colors where budgets would allow, and creating artworks equal to any oil painting.
Fierce competition caused cigar makers to hand lithographers a virtual "balnk check" to create the most eye appealing images for the inside lids of cigar boxes. Unlike today's high-volume four-color presses that an effortlessly crank out everything from "limited editions" to baseball cards, the early 20th-century stone litho process was much more complicated and labor-intensive.
Sone lithography, invented by Aloys Senefelder in 1796, worked on the principle that water and oil don't mix. to create a single new cigar art drawing, and artist ahd to create the image to be produced in each color (up to 22 in some cases) on a separate 300-pound Bavarian limestone. The artist drew on this stone with a wax crayon, dampening the stone with water. When oily printing ink was applied to the stone, the ink appeared only the the wax crayon image. Pressing a sheet of paper against the stone would transfer the inked design to the paper. This process was repeated until all 12 to 22 color images were assembled to complete the finished product. In an effort to give the labels a three dimensional bas-relief effect, the labels were then embossed on a 30-ton press after 22k gold leafing was applied. Records fromt he old Schlegel Litho Company of New York document a cost of up to $6,000 to complete a start-up design for a new brand in 1890. Try converting that to 1995 dollars!
Fortunately for the mom-and-pop cigar makers, lithographers accepted orders for modest quantities of "stock" labels that featured a broad variety of subjects, from cowboys-and-Indians to sports, transportation, animals, pretty girls, and cartoon characters. Wealthier cigar makers, (and there were many of them), spent top dollar to create "vanity labels" featuringt themselves, their families, or even their pets.
Fortunately for collectors and historians, many of the remaining labels that exist in today's market were discovered in abandoned cigar factories, box companies, and old litho firms. One might imagine that the discovery of some of these spectacular artworks would create an instant furor in the art world. Not so. As old factories and buildings began ot be torn down in the 1970's, the surviving labels began to surface at flea markets across the country and generating little or no excitement in "establishment" circles. One art critic likened this scenario to the biblical phrase "casting pearls before swine."
Although that analaysis may seem harsh, the labels had unquestionably surfaced in the wrong venue. by 1979, the tide turned and cigar label art began to appear in more proper forums. That year, beautifully framed cigar labels priced at $79.95 were selling briskly at three Bloomingdale's stores in New York and at Merrill-Chase Galleries in chicago. At the very same time, Fortune 500 corporations--such as the 3M Company and Mead Paper--were presenting cigar boxes as executive gifts to hundreds of important clients. the icing was applied to the cake on September 7, 1979, when the Wall Street Journal published a front-page feature story on cigar labels as a growth industry in both the collectible and investment markets.
Click for page 4 of Labels.
