🍂 Vintage Martin Mild Perfecto Cigar Band with TEAR HERE Tab, Unused NOS
Size: 2 3/4\" x 3/4\"
An unused strip-style cigar band from the cellophane-wrapped cigar years: red paper printed in white, MILD / MARTIN / PERFECTO, with a pointed TEAR HERE pull tab.
SPECIFICATIONS
- Brand on band: MARTIN
- Printed words: MILD, MARTIN (in a scrollwork oval), PERFECTO, TEAR HERE
- Style: long strip band with a pointed tear tab at one end and a plain white tab at the other
- Colors: red paper, white printing
- Size: 2.75 x 0.75 inches
- Era: 1930s to 1960s, the years of cellophane-wrapped cigars with tear strips
CONDITION
New old stock. Never applied and never torn. The back is plain paper with the lettering faintly showing through.
THE STORY
Why it tears. DuPont\'s William Hale Charch made cellophane moisture-proof in 1927, and from 1930 tobacco was the first industry to adopt it widely. International Cigar Machinery Co. filed for a cigar tear-strip wrapping machine in 1934, with a pointed pull tab on the strip, and in 1960 filed on a machine that used the cigar band itself as the tear strip. This band, printed TEAR HERE on its pointed end, was made for a cigar sealed that way.
The legend. The old story says Catherine the Great wrapped cigars in silk to keep her fingers clean. The first paper bands are usually credited to Gustave Bock, a Dutch-born cigar maker in Cuba, in the 1830s. By 1900, four of every five American men smoked cigars, and some 2 billion cigar bands were sold in the United States that year alone. Collectors tell the bands a maker put on its own cigars apart from publicity bands printed to advertise events, clubs or products, and they say some bands never made it onto a cigar at all, surviving as flat printer\'s stock like this one.
The words. MARTIN is the brand, MILD the strength, PERFECTO the shape: a cigar tapered at both ends and thick in the middle.
Other Martins. Not the five-cent Abe Martin cigar made in Indianapolis under license from humorist Kin Hubbard, and not the cigars named for Pedro Martín, who founded Tropical Tobacco in 1978.
GOOD FOR
- Vitolphilia and cigar band collectors
- Tobacco and drugstore advertising ephemera
- Framing with a humidor, cigar box or smoking stand
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