The big glass jar was chock full of colorful cigar bands, all looking as if they’d just been delicately removed from too many cigars. Individually, they were about size of a man’s swollen ring finger.
I could not see all of them clearly in the barrel-shaped counter jar, but I knew they bore the names of their makers. A few of the labels were turned in such a way that I could see them: A. Fuente, Bock, Excalibur.
Since there were so many bands, I assumed that the they either belonged to a collector or a man who smoked. It seems that some smokers are also collectors, and others just hang onto their cigar bands – much like, I suspect, folks who used to hoard matchbooks.
These days, not too many folks collect cigar bands, whose heyday was at the turn of the 20th century. There was even an association of cigar-band collectors, founded in the United States in 1934, but I could find no website for it now. In Havana, Cuba, cigar bands are one of the main attractions in the city’s cigar museum. Cigar bands even have their own name, vitolas, and the artwork on the bands is called vitolphilia.
No one seems to really know when cigar bands were first used, but there are legends:
In 19th century Russia, Catherine the Great ordered that her cigars be wrapped in silk so they wouldn’t stain her fingers.
In 19th century England, cigar bands were created for high-brow British gentlemen to prevent staining their white gloves when they smoked while out and about.
In 19th century Germany, cigar manufacturers, who were producing most of the world’s cigars, began selling theirs as Cubans, which were considered the best. To combat the practice, around 1854, Gustave Bock, a European who was living in Cuba, started putting paper rings with his signature on his cigars. The practice was taken up by other Cuban cigar manufacturers.
The bands were made to hold low-grade cigars together.
The Bock story seems to be considered the one most likely. During the mid-19th century, cigar manufacturers placed labels on their boxes and bands on their cigars. The 1890s to World War I was said to the golden age for cigar-band production. Companies hired skilled lithographers to create beautiful labels and bands that were considered works of art, and people started collecting these images of political and church leaders, animals, plants, symbols, and more. I think the most beautiful ones were the labels on cigar boxes.
The peak appears to have been at the turn of the 20th century. Cigar companies sold the bands, and promotion companies gave away free albums to hold them. One cigar company offered products in exchange for bands – from baseball gloves (150 bands) to bedroom sets (44,000 bands) to baby grand pianos (179,950 bands). This all ended around the 1920s when many of the cigar companies folded. Lithography was replaced by offset printing.
Decades later, though, a company called Bandwagon USA advertised a similar program. In newspaper ads in the late 1960s, it encouraged people to trade cigar bands for such products as costume jewelry, paperback books, 45 records, harmonicas, nylons and Interwoven socks.
Collecting is not the only thing that has been done with cigar bands. Take a look at this cigar-band paper smoking jacket, silk cigar bands made into a quilt and cigar bands pasted to a glass dish. A museum in a town in the Netherlands has a mosaic made entirely out of cigar bands.
If you’re interested in collecting, here are some tips from Orlando Arteaga Abreu, considered “the” expert on cigar bands. But don’t think you’ll get rich selling your collection. You could expand your collection to cigar box labels and look for these rare ones. Here’s a gallery of some lovely bands.
If you come across a Coca Cola cigar band, eye it warily. The company sold cigars with bands to the public and also gave them away at company events in the 1930s. The company apparently also issued cigars at the premiere event for its new Sprite soft drink. This foray into cigars was short-lived. Don’t get those real Coke cigar bands mixed up with faux bands that were published in a 1933 illustration for a Fortune magazine article.
