Cigarette paper

“ Then there was a pile of magazines and beyond them a stack of books whose subjects varied from Balzac to strange, scientific-sounding names. At the other end of the shelf, within easy reach from one lying upon the bunk, was a cigar-box full of smoking tobacco, a half-dozen books of cigarette papers, and several blocks of the small, evil-smelling matches which men of the outdoors carry for their compact form and slow, steady blaze.
At the head of the bed hung a flour-sack half full of some hard, lumpy stuff which Billy Louise had not noticed before. ”

“ MY friend, the Architect, who is something of a traveller, was showing us various curios which he had gathered during a visit to the Orient.
"Here is something for you," he said, picking up a small box and turning it over in his hand. "You are a cigarette-smoker; take this home with you. It was given to me in Cairo by a species of fakir, who fancied I had done him a good turn."
The box was covered with glazed, yellow paper, so skilfully gummed as to appear to be all one piece. It bore no label, no stamp -- nothing to indicate its contents.
"How do you know they are cigarettes?" ”

“ Each has a heavy chain dangling from his waist and attached to his ankle, wears a broad-brimmed straw hat of his own manufacture, and incessantly smokes. Before him is a wooden box filled with picadura and small squares of tissue paper. Great nicety is required to roll a cigarette after the approved fashion; the strength or mildness of the tobacco being in a great measure influenced by the way the grains are more or less compressed. A smoker of course finds a tightly-twisted cigarette more difficult to draw than a loosely twisted one. ”

“ The paper in which the cheap tobacco is rolled for cigarettes is of poor quality, producing empyreumatic oil, which contains creosote in large quantities. The odor they give out is ranker, fouler, and more acrid than that from a clay pipe. From a cigar to a cigarette the descent is from the sublime to the ridiculous.
We are not talking, however, about smoking in general, but about this modern fashion of cigarette smoking by boys. It is far worse than pipes or cigars. ”

“ If paper is used, attach several thicknesses to your drawing board and provide yourself with a sharp penknife. If used as a blackboard illustration, an eraser will be needed.
The Talk.
"It is a good deal safer, boys, for you to walk the streets with your thumb in your mouth than with a cigarette there. The thumb can't hurt you, but the cigarette is bound to. I heard, once upon a time, of a young man who lived in a good home—maybe just as good as yours—who fell into the cigarette habit. ”

“ The box contained six cigarettes, evidently hand-made. The wrappers were of pale-yellow paper, and the tobacco was almost the same colour. It was of finer cut than the Turkish or ordinary Egyptian, and threads of it stuck out at either end.
"Will you try one now, Madam?" asked the Architect, offering to strike a match.
"Not now and not here," I replied, "after the coffee, if you will permit me to slip into your smoking-den. Some of the women here detest the odour of cigarettes." ”

“ First Method.—The performer is smoking a cigarette; this is an indispensable condition of the trick. By the side of the cigarette, on the right, concealed between the lips, is a little paper ball made from a duplicate whole paper. When presenting the trick, as when smoking in the ordinary way, the cigarette is occasionally taken between the forefinger and thumb of the right hand; experiment will also show that the little paper ball may be removed and replaced, quite secretly, by holding it between the finger and thumb of same hand. ”

“ Us boys were smoking cigarettes one day made of paper and dried dandelion leaves, and the boy at the butcher shop said if we would dry some wiener skin and cut it up and put it in the cigarette and smoke it, it would make the finest flavor, and make us strong. ”

“ Here artists are engaged in preparing lithographic stones and wood blocks with various picturesque designs for cigarette labels. Gilders are illuminating labels, and cutters are shaping paper into their cigarette and label sizes. Further on are printing offices, where all the letterpress and lithography required in the establishment is accomplished. This is far from an insignificant item in the manufactory, for, besides the pictorial and letterpress covers, there are the Honradez advertisements to print ”

“ Smoking is commenced at a very early age, and every little boy has his own tobacco supply and packet of cigarette-papers. As he trots to school in the morning he puffs away vigorously, occasionally passing his cigarette to a friend that he also may take a few whiffs. If the cigarette is not finished when he arrives at school, he pinches off the hot end and puts the rest behind one of his ears, as we might put a pencil or a pen. ”

“ If you are not an adept at palming I would suggest the following easy method: Lay your handkerchief across your knees, and on it place the prepared cigarette. While reaching for a match, drop the cigarette you have just made on your lap, as if by accident, and pick up the one containing the card. You can afterwards pick up your handkerchief and put it and the genuine cigarette in your pocket. You then light the prepared cigarette and ask your friend to hand you the pack and name his card; when he does so, tell him you will produce the card in any place he may name. ”

“ On the opposite side of the room, also before small black tables, sit two men, to wit, Victor Ivanowitch Dumnoff and the Count. It is their business to shape the tobacco and to insert it into the shells, a process performed by rolling the cut leaf into a cylinder in a tongue-shaped piece of parchment, which, when ready, has the form of a pencil, and is slipped into the shell. The parchment is then withdrawn, and the tobacco remains behind in its place; the little bunch of threads which protrudes at each end is cut off with sharp scissors and the cigarette is finished. ”

“ Of all the soldiers' wants the most imperative appears to be the harmless necessary cigarette. All their letters clamor for tobacco in that form. "We can't get a decent smoke here," says one writer. An army airman "simply craves for cigarettes and matches." From a cavalryman comes the appeal that a few boxes of cigarettes and some thick chocolate would be luxuries. ”

“ When, as is often the case, the wrapper is very narrow and the tobacco is inclined to escape, the man smokes his cigarette in a peculiar manner; he holds the unlighted end in his fingers and with his mouth draws out the smoke from between the edges of the wrapper in the middle of the cigarette, this he continues to do until the cigarette is about half consumed when he puts the end in his mouth in the ordinary way. ”

“ In the meantime, Joe Kingsley had finished his pack of cigarettes without having noted the lettering on any one of them. This seems unlikely at first sight. Yet an inveterate smoker will admit that he is not inclined to read the label on his cigarette, especially one who is busy with his hands most of the time and who may smoke a full package of cigarettes during the working day and another at night. ”

“ Cigarettes appear to give less trouble than pipes. Any one, drunk or sober, can light them and keep them alight. They can be put out at any moment and returned to the cigarette case or tucked behind the ear. Also, it is held by snobs as well as by haters of foul pipes that cigarettes are more genteel, or whatever the name is of our equivalent vice. But if a pipe is to be smoked, the briar is believed to cast some sort of faint credit on the smoker which the clay does not. ”

“ In America, a specially-prepared brown paper, saturated with the juice expressed from tobacco-stems and other refuse, is most extensively used, not only for the “wrappers” of cigars, but also for “filling.” Various ground woods, starches, meals, and pigments are introduced into snuff.
A New York paper mentions that a great quantity of brown straw paper lately reached Havana, which was to be employed in the manufacture of Havana cigars. Straw paper impregnated with the juice of tobacco stalks is wound up with the leaf in such a way that it is often impossible to detect the adulteration. ”

“ And smoking a yard of clay.
Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign female smoking in the nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned. Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be whispered that here and there a lady—who was usually considered dreadfully "fast" for her pains—was accustomed to venture upon a cigarette. ”

“ In the manufacture of tobacco for smoking, we have to do with the numerous forms of tobacco used for smoking in pipes, embracing cut smoking mixtures, cake or plug, and roll or spun tobacco. Under this heading come also the cigar and cigarette manufacture.
The raw material in the warehouses is of various qualities: some is strong, rough and harsh, and so is unfit for ordinary smoking; other samples are mild and fine, with aromatic and pleasant flavour, but devoid of strength. ”

“ A caravan of sixty camels bringing in or taking out bales of marmot skins must halt for two or three days while every skin is counted and the bales made up again. When an Anglo-American branch got in a shipment of 172cigarettes, every one of the ninety-eight packages in each of the seventy-two cases had to be counted. Why they did not count each cigarette remains a mystery. The same rule applies to bricks of tea, cakes of chocolate, and the most minute of articles. ”

“ It can well be imagined that one had to pay heavily for them, about fourpence apiece, for a very low-class cigarette made of German tobacco, being an average price. Even then one could only manage to buy a limited number. Often enough a cigarette would be divided in half and shared with one’s pal, so that one seldom got more than a few whiffs. Cigarettes arriving in parcels from home were, of course, not delivered to us. ”

“ The cigar dealt the snuff-box its death-blow and the cigarette was chief mourner at its funeral.
As in other periods, men of letters and artists ignored the social prejudices and conventions about tobacco, and laughed at the artificial distinctions drawn between cigars and pipes. It is said that the late Sir John Millais smoked a clay pipe in his carriage when he was part of the first Jubilee procession of Queen Victoria—a performance, if it took place, which would certainly have horrified her tobacco-hating Majesty. ”

“ Tobacco Fibre has been before the trade for some years, the idea being to utilise tobacco stems and other tobacco waste for the manufacture of paper suitable for use as wrappers for cigars, cigarettes, and similar purposes. ”

“ It was not the custom for young girls of my age to smoke cigarettes. It was not considered good form for a débutante to do anything of that sort. I had so far refused all cocktails and wines at dinners. However, I knew how to manage a cigarette. As a lark at boarding-school I had consumed a quarter of an inch of as many as a half-dozen cigarettes. In some amateur theatricals the winter before, in which I took the part of a young man, I had bravely smoked through half of one, and made my speeches too. What this man had said of Hilton and its provincialism was in my mind now. ”

“ When we think of the extraordinary uses to which paper is applied, it is not so startling to learn that this material may even enter into the composition of our post-prandial cigar. If we are to believe the newspapers, millions of cigars are annually manufactured in Havana without so much as a single fibre of tobacco-leaf being utilised in the process of their fabrication. The great straw-paper factory in New York State has for some time been making a peculiar sort of extremely thin fine paper, which it has been discovered is used for making cigars. ”

“ Unless the man to whom the parcel is to be sent is definitely known to be prejudiced against cigarettes, don't send him pipe tobacco or a pipe. There are smokers who hate cigarettes just as there are some people who think that the little paper roll is an invention of the devil. If any one has a boy over there, he—or she—had better overcome any possible personal feeling against the use of cigarettes and send them in preference to anything else. ”

“ For all her masculine appearance, she was French and the young road marker was lavishing upon her everything he had gleaned in a Freshman year of French in a Spokane high school.
I offered my cigarette case and was surprised when the girl refrained. That surprise increased when I saw her extract from a leather case of her own a full fledged black cigar which she proceeded to light and smoke with gusto. When I expressed my greater surprise, she increased it by shrugging her shoulders prettily, plunging one gauntleted hand into a side pocket and producing a pipe with a pouch of tobacco. ”

“ Each one awaits his turn, and then receives, after it has been carefully weighed, his or her allowance of tobacco, some five thousand papers, and a large wooden hoop. The hoop serves as a rude but very accurate gauge, its circumference being of such a size as to properly encompass five thousand cigarettes of such size as will contain the entire amount of tobacco issued. A slight excess of both tobacco and paper, say sufficient to make forty or fifty cigarettes, is usually given, intended for the personal consumption of the employee. ”