Byline: Wendy Bounds The Wall Street Journal
Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man may soon be the hottest collectibles in the memorabilia market.
If Congress approves the proposed tobacco settlement, cigarette vending machines, advertisements featuring cartoon and human characters and brand-name promotional merchandise would be outlawed. All those items - including fishhooks, flashlights, hats, pocket knives and shot glasses featuring the big-snouted beast and other tobacco trademarks - could be ripe for hoarding and trading.
Prices of some memorabilia are already climbing in anticipation. Chris Cooper, a Texas collector, says he recently sold a cardboard Joe Camel figure for $150 to a man from Oklahoma. Cooper got it free from a grocery store.
''It's just like the stock market - as soon as collectors even sniff something won't be available or is in the news, they jump,'' says Bob Strong, owner of Rescued Estates, an antique and contemporary collectibles store in New York.
Strong estimates that classic cigarette vending machines, which currently sell for around $300 to $700, will likely jump to about $1,200 to $2,000 as collectors become aware of the proposed settlement. Old Joe Camel magazine ads that now sell for $5 to $10, ''will probably be worth a small fortune as soon as all this sinks in,'' says Strong. He estimates they could jump to $250.
''I've heard of a lot of collectors who have been actively accumulating these items over the last few years in anticipation of this,'' says Dale Coats, site manager of the Duke Homestead State Historic Site in Durham, N.C., which maintains a tobacco museum. The site is named after Washington Duke, the founder of American Tobacco Co., a predecessor to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Coats says he hopes the museum will add to its collection in the next few months. ''I think the proposed settlement makes these things more valuable,'' he says.
Why would anyone want to accumulate paraphernalia associated with a deadly habit? Strong says that some collectors have fond memories associated with cigarettes.
''Maybe you were a kid, and it was a happy time,'' he says. ''You were in a store, and your father let you play with a vending machine.''
For investment purposes, experts say that vintage items, like antique vending machines, are a safer bet than contemporary memorabilia, which is still fairly plentiful. There are some 400,000 modern cigarette vending machines in the U.S., and Joe Camel ads still blanket magazines every week. ''This is a market you have to create,'' says Dana Hawkes, director of the collectibles department for Sotheby's auction house. ''It could take 25 years before people say, 'I remember those machines,' and start responding.''
Ms. Hawkes says that Sotheby's has not yet auctioned an antique cigarette machine, but she notes that a 1994 sale of coin-operated vending machines from the early 1900s drew bids from $500 to $25,000. The machines, which included chewing gum dispensers and test-your-strength games, reminded collectors of ''the old Coney Island days,'' she says.
Cooper keeps about 30,000 different pieces of tobacco history in two rooms built adjacent to his Pittsburg, Texas, home. Included is a roomful of tobacco magazine advertising and trade cards, postcard-size cigarette ads with a scenic picture or a sports figure on the front, which were popular between 1870 and 1900. People saved and collected the cards in scrapbooks, says Cooper, who estimates that they are worth between $10 and $300 today.
He also has nearly 6,000 ''tags,'' the little pieces of metal that were stamped into plugs of chewing tobacco from about 1875 until 1939. These tags, which bore the tobacco companies' names or emblems, were redeemable for gifts like baseball mitts and pianos - much the same way Camel Cash is now. Cooper says the tags sell for between five cents and more than $1,000 today, depending on their age and rarity. ''All that for a tiny piece of metal,'' he says.
Cooper estimates that prices on ''all tobacco collectibles'' have already tripled in the last several years, as talks of banning cigarette items proliferated. An old chewing-tobacco tin featuring baseball great Ty Cobb can command as much as $25,000, he notes. And with a much-publicized settlement pending, he expects prices to jump again on everything smoking-related.
At George Gallagher's Pittsburgh antique store, Now & Then, sales of tobacco paraphernalia also have picked up during the last month or two. ''All my cigar advertising is gone,'' he notes. ''I've got a Camel cigarette neon sign, and I think the price for it could go sky-high.'' He adds that anything tobacco-related ''is like money in the bank.''
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Photo
This 1950s ad for Marlboro cigarettes ran in the Saturday Evening Post