Cigars, Cigar Information and where to find Premium Cigars, Discounted Cigars and even Cheap Cigars - THOMPSON’S SECOND “CIGAR ARTISANS” SUPER-PARTY ON SATURDAY

THOMPSON’S SECOND “CIGAR ARTISANS” SUPER-PARTY ON SATURDAY

THOMPSON’S SECOND “CIGAR ARTISANS” SUPER-PARTY ON SATURDAY

Plus: your invitation to the National Cigar Museum!

Los Angeles, September 13 – It’s not quite the “Super Bowl” for cigar smokers yet, but Thompson Cigar Company’s “Cigar Artisans” event is moving in that direction.

The second annual edition will come on this Saturday with a limit of 1,500 attendees, at $125 per ticket, up from $110 last year. It’s not quite sold out yet, but the “VIP” packages – limited to 400 – at $150 each have all been sold. The capacity has been expanded from about 900 attendees last year to 1,500 this time.

The program is being held inside and outside of Thompson’s Tampa headquarters at 5401 Hangar Court near the Tampa airport from noon to 5 p.m., with the VIP Ticket holders being let in an hour earlier.

What do people get for their $125? Enough cigars and other stuff to open their own stores:

• More than 50 cigars, worth the price of admission alone;

• A travel cooler full of more cigar stuff and a Thompson Cigar Artisans baseball cap;

• Entry into the event raffle, which includes prizes such as a vacation trip to the Dominican Republic, two round-trip air tickets for travel within the continental U.S.; a SkiDoo Jet Ski, plasma televisions and a lot more cigar stuff;

• Cigar rolling demonstrations and reps from more than four dozen major and minor cigar companies such as Arturo Fuente, Ashton Distributors, C.A.O., Cusano Cigars, Davidoff of Geneva, Drew Estates, General Cigar, J.C. Newman, Oliva Cigar Co., Rocky Patel Premium Cigars, Tabacalera Perdomo and others.

• All the food and drink you can handle, with catering by Hungry Harry’s Famous Bar-B-Que.

VIP ticket holders will get a special, giant-sized cigar as an additional bonus. Plus there will be plenty of deals on cutters, humidors, lighters and so on. A portion of the proceeds from the event will be donated to Southeastern Guide Dogs, Inc., a service company that trains guide dogs.

The Cigar Artisans event is part of a growing trend by retailers, rather than manufacturers, to hold mega-events for cigar smokers. Moreover, in view of widespread smoking bans, retailers who have space either in or around their stores (think parking lots) are using them for events. Thompson’s is one of the biggest in or around a retail store location, but innovative retailers like Kansas City’s Outlaw Cigar Co. – whose “Bad to the Bone” events program includes appearances from U.S. Army Apache helicopters and Abrams tanks – are reinforcing their relationships with customers and creating new ones with unique experiences that bring a new meaning to the “Cigar life.”

A quick steal of a deal:
Thompson’s has one of our most-appreciated cigar gadgets on sale right now, its exclusive Cigar Box Opener. This is a 7 3/4-inch long, two-sided, specially-made tool for cigar smokers. It has a serrated steel blade on one side to cut through box labels and seals. The other side is smooth, to allow you to pry open boxes without having to destroy the box because of a strong box nail. And there’s a notch in the middle of the smooth side which is used to lever a box open and remove the nail at the same time.

It’s a terrific item and worth the $19.95 you’d normally pay for it, because it will last a lifetime. But it’s on sale now for $9.95! Ask for item no. JQ-915161 and you won’t regret it!

Visit the National Cigar Museum!
“Part of it was curiosity; part of it was the fact that nobody else was doing it,” explains Dr. Tony Hyman, the one-man dynamo behind the online National Cigar Museum.

Hyman, who started his box collection in tiny Redlands, California and now continues it in Shell Beach on the central California coast, told the Santa Maria Times how he got started. “I brought home a dozen [empty] boxes, and I remember sitting there, thinking, ‘Wow, these are all different,’ and literally, virtually out loud, said ‘I wonder how many different kinds are there?’”

As he found out, quite a lot. In his introduction to the Museum, Hyman writes that in more than 55 years of collecting, “I learned:

“[1] the domestic cigar industry is almost 250 years old, and is much larger than previously recorded, involving a quarter million cigar factories, hundreds of label printers, a thousand box factories, hundreds of thousands of salesmen and millions of wholesalers and retailers

“and

“[2] that cigars had more to do with the development of modern advertising and packaging than any other industry, creating more than 2,000,000 brands of cigar in the process.”

Hyman’s online museum has drawn interest from many quarters and has now attracted financial support from J-R Cigars’ Lew Rothman, through his Cigar Magazine company.

There are sections on types of boxes, label style (including some early Cuban labels), cigar definitions, plenty of articles on Cuba and a sensational article on “Bad Brand Names” with such doozies (including illustrations of the boxes) as “Chump,” “Sucker,” “Misfits,” “Old Nut,” “Quail on Toast,” “Peeping Tom,” “King DoDo” and others.

As Rothman writes in the current issue of his magazine, it’s a welcome resource for every “cigar geek.” But don’t try to visit the Museum in a few minutes of spare time. Take the two hours or so you’ll need to wander through the site and the history of cigars. And then make a point to come back again to see what’s new, or how you can contribute to filling out a little more of the cigar’s amazing history in America.
~ Rich Perelman

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