 Cigars used to come in more than boxes
Los Angeles, July 9 – Smoking cigars is fun. But the pleasure eventually ends when the cigar is consumed and the anguish of the final cigar of a cherished box is best left unspoken, even between connoisseurs.
But a small number of brands – in Cuba and elsewhere – have seen fit to offer their cigars inside lasting works of art. Sometimes in humidors, but especially in glass or ceramic jars.
The practice is reported to have begun at the H. Upmann factory between 1910 and 1920, likely when it was still under the control of the Upmann family. A selection of 25 or sometimes 50 cigars was packed in a solid glass jar with a sealed top and metal clamps on two or three sides of the top to keep it as air tight as possible.
Over the succeeding years, glass jars were produced for Cuban brands including H. Upmann, Hoyo de Monterrey, Partagas and Punch and for many brands outside of Cuba, such as Gold Medal and R.G. Dun in the United States.
Highly decorated ceramic jars were produced for Partagas in the 1920s, with blue lettering, and in the 1960s and 1970s with brown lettering and artwork (shown above) by Partagas and Ramon Allones. These can still be found today.
Close watchers of the eBay auction site see these items come up for bid every so often. Within the past year, a couple of Partagas Sevilla Humijar auctions (like the photo above) have yielded final prices as high as $701. The only blue Partagas Tavalera Jar offered went for $620. Only a couple of Ramon Allones (brown) jars came up and went for between $213-320, but a pre-Revolution bakelite (!) Ramon Allones jar in good condition yielded a staggering $737.72 last March.
More affordable – and much more common – are glass jars, especially from H. Upmann, which offered this item into the 1990s. These are often seen on eBay, in varying condition, and draw from $50-200. The most highly prized are those with the interior cedar lining intact and with a well-preserved leather carry strap.
Jars made a comeback during the Cigar Boom, and we’ll bring you up to the present in tomorrow’s installment of the Cyclopedia Journal.
~ Rich Perelman
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