“Part of it was curiosity; part of it was the fact that nobody else was doing it,” explains Dr. Tony Hyman, the one-man dynamo behind the online National Cigar Museum.

Hyman, who started his box collection in tiny Redlands, California and now continues it in Shell Beach on the central California coast, told the Santa Maria Times how he got started. “I brought home a dozen [empty] boxes, and I remember sitting there, thinking, “Wow, these are all different,” and literally, virtually out loud, said “I wonder how many different kinds are there?”

As he found out, quite a lot. In his introduction to the Museum, Hyman writes that in more than 55 years of collecting, “I learned:

[1] the domestic cigar industry is almost 250 years old, and is much larger than previously recorded, involving a quarter million cigar factories, hundreds of label printers, a thousand box factories, hundreds of thousands of salesmen and millions of wholesalers and retailers”

“[2] that cigars had more to do with the development of modern advertising and packaging than any other industry, creating more than 2,000,000 brands of cigar in the process.”

There are sections on types of boxes, label style (including some early Cuban labels), cigar definitions, plenty of articles on Cuba and a sensational article on “Bad Brand Names” with such doozies (including illustrations of the boxes) as “Chump,” “Sucker,” “Misfits,” “Old Nut,” “Quail on Toast,” “Peeping Tom,” “King DoDo” and others.

Don’t try to visit the Museum in a few minutes of spare time. Take the two hours or so you’ll need to wander through the site and the history of cigars. And then make a point to come back again to see what’s new, or how you can contribute to filling out a little more of the cigar’s amazing history in America.