Tobacciana's Illicit Corner: Erotic Tobacco Collectibles

Tobacciana is the name given to the collecting field devoted to objects produced around tobacco and its consumption. Pipes and tampers, snuff boxes, cigar cutters and bands, tobacco tins, matchboxes, box labels, posters, and promotional print matter form the field's everyday material.

Within this broad repertoire researchers also identify one particular thread: objects carrying erotic or explicit imagery, ranging from mere suggestion to outright depiction. The article below summarizes that thread as a historical phenomenon; it does not reproduce images or detailed descriptions of the objects themselves.

Sexual Imagery in Advertising and Print

1. In the last quarter of the century, tobacco companies made pairing their products with female figures a standard promotional device. In the United States, the picture cards inserted into cigarette packs began in 1879 with Allen & Ginter; the earliest series placed portraits of actresses alongside boxers and baseball players, tribal chiefs, flags, and wild animals. Cigar box labels and wall posters drew on the same repertoire, often with a freer hand. The period's visual art pursued the same connection independently: the Belgian painter and printmaker Félicien Rops (1833-1898) is known for the prints and drawings he made for nineteenth-century erotic literature, and his name comes up often in studies of the smoking woman as a period icon.