From mug-shaped cigar boxes to gameboard boxes, the cigar makers of the world have shown great creativity in packaging their wares, and no period was more fertile for the cigar-box collector as that from 1878 to the early twentieth century. (All info here courtesy of the National Cigar Museum.)
The novelty cigar box began with a Federal decision in 1878, when postal codes were changed to...
Most nonsmokers think of tobacco plants as interchangeable - if you've smoked one, you've smoked 'em all. But as anyone knows who has ever compared the taste of a premium cigar to a cheap one - or who has visited the Middle East, where an undreamt-of range of sweetly intense tobacco smells assault the tourist's nostril - nothing could be further from the truth. Tobacco plants vary as widely -...
As we take a closer look at premium cigars from all over the world - those coming from both likely and
unlikely regions - we pass on to Honduras, Italy, Mexico and Nicaragua. That's two world-class cigar-making regions that every smoker knows about - and two regions many cigar aficionados don't. But once upon a time the cigars of Honduras and Nicaragua were similarly eclipsed by the great...
Cigars come from all over the world. Why, then, do cigar aficionados so often limit themselves to a handful (literally) of well-regarded smokes from a few highly-regarded companies or regions? Perhaps like a passionate music fan visiting the "International" section of a CD store for the first time - they're confused, stymied by the very breadth of their options. How do you know what's good?...
With the publication, in 2001, of Laura Hillenbrand's bestseller Seabiscuit, a new generation of Americans learned about the unremitting hardness of life in the early days of American Thoroughbred horse racing - for horse and rider alike. Hillenbrand's book will tell you all you'd ever want to know about the dietary depredations self-inflicted by jockeys - the anorexia and bulimia, the...
We remember the 1940s this way: as the decade when America stepped up, and everything changed. As the decade began, the US was an isolationist emerging world power hoping to avoid the latest bloody European conflagration; as 1945 closed, it was the dominant Western nation. The stories of the decade's greatest racehorses reflects this moment of upheaval, with an injured horse and a filly winning...
First there was road rage; next, air rage, and then computer rage. Now, more and more consumers find themselves experiencing wrap rage.
Apparently first used in print in a 2003 item in London's Daily Telegraph, the term "wrap rage" is rapidly catching on as a name for that peculiar combination of irrational frustration and homicidal anger brought on by hard-to-remove product packaging....
Maybe it's Victorianism. Or perhaps it's that '30s stereotype we all still have of cigar smokers as heavyset, overcoated, wealthy men, lighting their stogies with $100 bills. Or maybe it's even because of that folkloric Freudianism, still so influential in America, that tells us cigars are always intended to- substitute for something.
But whatever the reason, cigar smoking is often thought...
Some businesses just are romantic than others.
For example, compare winemaking with toothpick-making. Now, the wine business is, on a day-by-day basis, anything but one ecstatic Cabernet Sauvignon after another. You have to handle distribution, advertising, labor, storage - one prosaic detail after another. And the toothpick isn't nearly as boring as it looks - science journalist Henry...
As more and more entertainment venues close themselves off to the rich, complicated odor of cigar smoke, perhaps it's time to remind ourselves that some of history's great artists - writers, entertainers, musicians - were not just smokers but cigar lovers. From comedians to social critics, from rockstar pianists to Christian apologists, these luminaries found the taste of cigars to be their...
