Like the Cuban examples in the first exhibit, these are the oldest cigar labels yet found, and among the earliest use of commercial lithography to create point-of-sale advertising for packaging of a commercial product. Tho from the same 1835 to 1868 period, the majority of these are neither as graphic nor as topical as those seen in the first Early Cuban Labels exhibit. These are exhibited to allow scholars of early advertising and packaging to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the struggles undergone by the pioneers who experimented with package and label design, layout, topic, font choice, color, and brand name. The cigar industry progressed from precedent-less chaos to innovation within standardization and gave birth, over the next half century, to all modern advertising.

         This expansion of the NCHM exhibit of the earliest known cigar labels is made possible by the courtesy of wine label aficionado Thomas Wangler, a German collector who found these in a scrapbook of wine and liquor labels he purchased.  Mr. Wangler has since disbursed the collection, now in private hands in the U.S., Canada, Europe and South America.