Cigar Label Art

Michael Moretti
Posted: August 14, 2006

A common interest and a chance meeting on vacation in Key West led to a bicoastal partnership and a business venture bringing vintage cigar labels to the masses.

Cigar Art Labels represents the compilation of a California collector who has a treasure trove of lithograph cigar brand images, mostly from the late 1800s, locked in a bank vault with a value estimated in the multimillion-dollar range. Enviro-Media is a New York-based archival printing and framing company that has the expertise and the equipment to frame and/or reproduce very old or very valuable original images on high-grade papers and inks that capture every little detail. In business for 10 years, Enviro's clients up until now have included mostly art galleries and artists.

When you go to the Cigar Label Art Web site, you can peruse a gallery of images available for purchase and auction. Most of the images are factory originals that never appeared on cigar boxes but were made with cigars in mind. The collector picked up many of them as part of the gallery books that cigar salesmen carried around in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the lithography business was booming and everyone making a regional cigar wanted a one-of-a-kind label.

The detailing on many of the images is exquisite, with inked, multicolored pictures, some boasting 24K gold embossing. A 16- by 20-inch label encased in a double-matte frame, fashioned to look like dried cigar leaves, carries a retail price of about $275 to $300. There are 18,000 original labels available for framing in quantities of 500 to 3,000 each. The printing technology that Enviro-Media owns is used to enlarge the original images. The company can produce images as large as four feet by six feet, and if desired, they can be made even bigger.

Call Enviro-Media at 631-723-0242 or go to www.cigarlabelart.com for more information.