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An old tobacco carton can be a valuable thing.
Wayne Biby of Winston-Salem was trying to sell one for $500 at yesterday's Piedmont Tobacco Memorabilia and Postcard Show and Sale in the Home and Garden building at the Dixie Classic Fairgrounds.
The carton once contained a cigarette brand called Reyno, one of the first cigarettes made by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Biby's former employer.
Thousands of other items could be purchased at the annual show. It was sponsored by the Piedmont Tobacco Memorabilia Collectors Club, which meets in High Point. About 400 people attended the show, organizers said. The items included a Camel mirror, a Wake Forest University lighter, an old postcard featuring the Reynolds Building at night, receipts, rolling papers, pocket tins, plug cutters, and tobacco grinders, tags and pouches.
"It's a connection to their past," Biby, a dealer, said about why people collect tobacco memorabilia. "It brings back stories that they heard their parents and grandparents talking about."
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Hundreds of cigarette packs covered the surface of a 1-meter by half-meter display table, attracting visitors at a recent exhibition for hobbyists in Kemang, South Jakarta.
Visitors taking a closer look at the table raised their eyebrows after realizing there was something peculiar about some of cigarette packs.
"I thought it was a pack of Marlboros, but no, the brand reads *Malioboro'," a young woman giggled.
Malioboro, the name of a famous shopping arcade in Yogyakarta, had been stylized to mimic the world-famous Marlboro logo.
Other visitors who noticed the parody broke into laughter, after realizing there were other "misspelled" brands on other cigarette packs they had thought they were familiar with.
"Many visitors were tricked with the physical appearance of some of the cigarette packs in our collection," Andreas, one of the exhibitors, told The Jakarta Post. . . .
Among the tricky brands were Blank, imitating Djarum's Black cigarettes, Start Milik (a play on Bentoel's Star Mild), and Gudang Ganda (mimicking Gudang Garam).
These "imitation" cigarette packs were among the thousands collected by members of the Indonesian Cigarette Collectors' Community.
Established in August last year, the community brings together collectors from all over the country to share information about cigarettes, and allows members to offer, sell or barter their collections through the Internet and meetings.
Every cigarette pack I ever collected has a story behind it.Emirza Irsan, the Indonesian Cigarette Collectors' Community chairman, in a remarkable story on the community's large collection of trademark-infringing "imitation" packs.
The most famous baseball card in the world - the 1909 T206 Honus Wagner that has long been shadowed by controversy and was once owned by NHL superstar Wayne Gretzky - has been sold again to yet another anonymous collector, this time for a record $2.8 million, according to the auction house that says it sold the card. . . .
Most collectors recognize the T206 Wagner as the most desirable card in their hobby. It is rare card - but by no means the hobby's rarest - because the American Tobacco Company, the cigarette manufacturer that issued the T206 series, abruptly stopped production after Wagner refused to give permission to use his likeness. Some card historians claim the Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop, still considered one of the game's greatest players, did not want to promote tobacco use to his young fans. Others say he was just another jock holding out for more money. Either way, an unknown number of T206 Wagners had already been printed and circulated in tobacco packs, and approximately 50 or 60 cards are still in circulation.
The world's a pretty lonely place for Bernd Goerlich.
He's the only person in the entire world who collects cigarettes. And he doesn't even smoke. . . .
He has more than 6,500 examples of cigarettes from around the world and from different time periods. His collection started in 1958 when he was 14 and noticed the different brands, colors and sizes of the cigarettes. . . .
His collection also is a demonstration of the evolution of cigarettes from unfiltered to mouthpieces to charcoal filters to modern-day filters. Goerlich even has a gold-filtered mouthpiece for a cigarette from 1914.
The Western Daily Press yesterday became the proud owners of some of Winston Churchill's trademark cigars - and now we are going to give them away to our readers. Early reports suggested the historic cigars had failed to sell at Lawrence's auctioneers in Crewkerne, Somerset - but in fact we had snapped up the unsmoked national treasures on behalf of our readers. . . .
It is hard to imagine the war time Prime Minister - recently voted the Greatest Briton in a TV poll - without one of the cigars. And now Daily Press readers will have the chance to own one.
One of the most comprehensive collections of smoking paraphernalia ever to appear at auction goes under the hammer on May 12. . . .
The Private Collection of Pipes, Tobac co Jars and Books of Mr Alfred Dunhill, amassed over four decades, is expected to fetch in excess of €75,000. . . . .
Notable among a number of antiquarian books are Biblotheca Nicotiana byWilliam Bragge, a First Catalogue of Books About Tobacco, circa 1874 (e2,941-e4,411), and A Brief and Accurate Treatise Concerning the taking of the Fume of Tobacco by Tobias Venner (e1,470-e2941). . . .
Furniture and Decorative Objects including the Private Collection of Pipes, Tobacco Jars and Books of Mr Alfred Dunhill, May 12, Christie's South Kensington, www.christies.com
The public's hatred of all things tobacco is a godsend to collectors of the stuff.
Pipe collector Charles Strom loves his little mermaid cheroot holder . . .
Strom, an administrator at New York University who has a collection of some 50 top-quality meerschaums, paid $300 for this set when he acquired it last year. "These gorgeous sculptures are undervalued," he says, "because they're related to tobacco--and tobacco is politically incorrect." . . .
The little mermaid was formerly housed in the Museum of Tobacco Art & History in Nashville, Tenn., a grand collection owned by what was once called U.S. Tobacco Co., the snuff vendor of Greenwich, Conn. Distancing itself as much as possible from the evils of puffing, the renamed U.S. Smokeless Tobacco shut the museum in 1998 and spat out most of its contents. Prizes like the mermaid went to a small group of buyers assembled by Ben Rapaport, a Reston, Va. authority on tobacciana collecting and the author of five books on antique pipes and related topics. . . .
Tobacciana enthusiasts pounce whenever a museum decides to unload. In 2001 British tobacco company Gallaher Group bought Austria Tabak, at one time Austria's government-run tobacco monopoly, and decided to shrink the company's museum. Three thousand objects from a collection of 11,000 were sold at auction last year, bringing in $535,000. . . .
Collectors are now salivating to see what will become of Dunhill's famed collection in London, which used to be on display at the company's Duke Street headquarters.
More than a half-century later, Johnson, 84, offered the fruits of his long obsession to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, turning over about 6,000 cigarette packages, classified into 24 albums by manufacturer and country of origin from Afghanistan to Venezuela.
The collection, says Smithsonian curator David Shayt, "encompasses the vast acreage of tobacco history. What Virgil has done is to display the face of the tobacco industry as it presented itself to the consumer, in album after album, page after page, in a very organized, antiseptic and dispassionate way. He chronicles tobacco’s rise and fall in a remarkably small space." . .
While cigarette manufacturers added lilac and rose perfume to attract female smokers, other additives were geared to both sexes. The Johnson collection documents cigarettes laced with rum, maple syrup, vermouth and honey. . .
Postwar America saw the rise of Atom cigarettes with translucent tips banded in orange, green and gold, evoking the fluorescence of uranium. . .
In addition to the Smithsonian collection, Johnson also donated about 4,000 cigarettes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for future research on tobacco and its uses. Sealed in glass vials, the cigarettes ensure that Johnson’s lifelong avocation will not go up in smoke.
Atom cigarettes.Post-war brand with translucent tips banded in orange, green and gold, evoking the fluorescence of uranium, according to an entertaining article on Virgil Johnson's huge tobacco-nalia collection at the Smithsonian. Johnson also donated about 4,000 cigarettes to the CDC for future research.