Cigar Box Labels & Bands
by Orlando Arteaga

By the middle of the 19th Century the big cigar manufacturers devised to place printed labels on the outside of their containers and a paper band around each cigar to improve the presentation of their products and to protect themselves against counterfeits. The cigar industry was already a highly productive one so they decided to hire the best lithographers who, using advanced printing techniques, made elegant cigar box labels and bands. This got the attention not only of customers but also of people with artistic sensibility who began soon collecting these beautiful objects considered as true art work. The first society of cigar bands collectors of the world was the International Cigar Band Society, founded in the United States in 1934, and one of the first worldwide known collectors was Louis Rubin, a New Yorker, who collected more than 100,000 cigar bands by 1957. Before dying he asked that his collection be conserved in one of the museums of the city.

Images below provided by Ron Schieber

Common Pictorial Bands 1900-1920
Cigar Bank for bundles, 12 inches.	Cigar Bands for bundles. Top image, Dearest & Best, for one cigar.

1930-50 Cigar Band collector offer.

Cover of a cigar band printer catalog containing 12 pages of un-cut bands.