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Antique Red Tips Embossed Cigar Box Label 🐴 Horse and Horseshoe, Consolidated Lithographing Corp., Brooklyn N.Y.
An unused, embossed and gold-bronzed Red Tips cigar box label: a black horse inside a red-tipped horseshoe with a riding crop, printed by the Brooklyn firm Fortune called America's foremost maker of cigar-box art. A 1920s label, printed no earlier than 1925.
SPECIFICATIONS
- Brand: Red Tips
- Size: 8 1/2" x 7"
- Printer: Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, Brooklyn, N.Y.
- Brand owner line: TITLE & DESIGN OWNED BY W. J. H. B. CO.
- Design: black horse with white-and-gold bridle in a dark horseshoe with red tips and nail holes, riding crop, golden-yellow oval; RED TIPS panel with two small horseshoes along the bottom of the sheet
- Process: chromolithograph with embossing and gold bronzing
- Age: 1920s at the earliest (printer's name adopted 1925)
CONDITION
Unused. The back is clean paper showing the embossing in reverse; it was never applied to a box. Colors and bronzing are bright.
THE STORY
The printer. Jacob A. Voice established his lithography business in 1903 and renamed his firm the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation in 1925, carrying on the Wm. Steiner & Sons line. In 1930 Consolidated bought the cigar label business of the American Lithographic Company, and in 1933 Fortune named it America's foremost maker of cigar-box art, even as competition from cigarettes collapsed much of the cigar trade. Sidney P. Voice, the firm's vice-president, kept a cigar band collection that survives at the New-York Historical Society.
The box law. The Revenue Act of 1864 required cigars to be sold in boxes and an 1865 law fixed the counts, which turned the cigar box into advertising and gave rise to New York's great label lithographers. Embossed labels began in 1884.
The gold. American printers mostly used bronze flakes pressed into embossing dies rather than real gold, and Consolidated's labels were finished with gold bronzing.
The legend. St. Dunstan, the tenth-century monk and blacksmith who became Archbishop of Canterbury, is said to have nailed a horseshoe to the Devil's hoof and freed him only after the Devil vowed never to pass a horseshoe hung over a door, the root of the lucky horseshoe on this label.
GOOD FOR
- Horse lovers, equestrian and farmhouse decor
- Cigar label and tobacco advertising collectors
- Brooklyn and New York printing history
- Framing for a study, den or tack room
