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Facts About Cigar Boxes

To the untrained eye it is a wooden box, but to a collector or an aficionado a cigar box -- particularly of the vintage variety -- is a thing of beauty and history. Traditionally cigar boxes were made of wood, but they can also be made of plastic, aluminum, tin, glass, plastic, brass or china. Produced in a variety of shapes and sizes to accommodate bundles of cigars of varying number, some designs recast the boxes as novelty cars, buses or bottles.

The Legalities of the Cigar Box
- The United States Revenue Act of 1864 made it a legal requirement for all cigars to be packed in boxes. The following year President Lincoln introduced a law that stated cigars must be packed in bundles of 25, 50, 100 or 250. Packets of regular size cigars sold in fives and tens were legalized in 1910.
Cigar Box Design
- The most common type of cigar box is the "Standard Nailed Wood" box (commonly abbreviated to "NW"), a design that features six pieces of wood nailed together and fitted with a muslin hinge. In the 20th century, the most common sized boxes held 25 or 50 cigars. Other designs include the Boite Nature (BN) made completely of unfinished wood; Cuban chests and cabinets, beautifully embossed boxes that were only affordable by the very rich; and tin cans, a popular method of packaging cigars from the 1910s to 1940s.
Materials
- Before 1925 most cigar boxes were made out of wood. In the 1920s, cost-cutting methods saw manufacturers switch to cheaper types of wood. By the end of World War II, most cigar boxes were made of cardboard. In 1870 a law passed permitting cigar boxes made of tin -- since then manufacturers have used aluminum, brass, plastic and even glass to make cigar boxes.
Novelty Designs
- One of the features that make vintage cigar boxes, in particular, so collectible -- minus the cigars -- is the elaborate and artistic designs of the boxes. Take the Novelty cigar box sold during the Depression in the 1940s, the "pirate's chest," which was cleverly marketed to be reused as a jewelry box. Reusing cigar boxes in a practical way was a trend from the 1910s onwards -- boxes were produced to hold games such as checkers and cribbage while others became storage boxes for letters and files.
Cigar Box Art
- Cigar box art was a variant of the "tramp art" popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A branch of folk art that used recycled materials such as cigar boxes and other commercial packaging to produce decorative pieces such as furniture, boxes and frames, tramp art is highly collectible.

Cigar Collecting