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

19. 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.

The Image Inside the Lens

The miniature photograph hidden inside a keepsake object grew out of the technical curiosity of the mid-nineteenth century. In 1857 René Dagron found a way to fix a microphotograph to the tip of a slender cylindrical lens; in this device — named for the Stanhope lens whose form he adapted — the image appears magnified when the lens is held up to a light source. The pieces Dagron called "photographic-microscopic jewels" were set into rings, ivory trinkets, pens, sewing implements, even violin bows. Collecting literature also counts pipes with a lens set into the mouthpiece or stem among the same family; according to that same literature, some of the images chosen were erotic scenes rather than the usual churches, monuments, and city views. What set the device apart was that the image was visible only to whoever raised the lens to their eye — not to anyone simply looking at the object.

In Mold, Porcelain, and Stone

Molding and carving left pipe makers a wide range of subject matter. Nineteenth-century molded clay pipes were produced in an enormous variety of forms, including portraits, animal figures, topical political caricatures, and outright explicit scenes; the literature on clay pipe archaeology reports that examples falling into this last group were seized and destroyed by customs authorities. Colored transfer printing, which became common on German porcelain pipe bowls in the second half of the nineteenth century, offered a far cheaper way to reproduce imagery than hand painting and broadened the range of subjects treated. Meerschaum, for its part, became the leading material for figural carving thanks to how readily it could be worked; the figural pipe tradition that continued in European workshops and later in Eskişehir meerschaum carving showed a range running from classical busts to erotic subjects.

Collections and the Boundary Question

The assembling of such objects has occasionally entered the record for political reasons. Genrikh Yagoda, who headed the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, from 1934 to 1936, was arrested in March 1937, and both his two residences in Moscow and his dacha were searched; according to the account based on the search record, 3,904 pornographic photographs, 11 films, and 165 obscenely carved pipes and cigarette holders were logged. Corruption was also among the charges against Yagoda; he was tried and shot in March 1938.

Reading the pipe as a sexual image is not solely a matter for collectors: in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud proposed a reading of the pipe as the formal counterpart of the male sexual organ, and that reading is frequently cited in the field's literature. Whether such objects should be counted as art or as explicit material remains an unresolved debate in collecting circles today; the criterion rarely goes beyond the collector's own judgment. A similar impasse has entered the legal record as well: in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1964 ruling in Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart openly declined to define obscenity, settling instead for saying he would know it when he saw it. For the broader framework of how the pipe moved from a utilitarian object to one of display and collection, see the World History of the Pipe article.