Topdog Presents: Always Interesting Toys and Models! This is an antique woven tobacco silk from the S25 college seal series issued around 1910 by the American Tobacco Company as a premium packed into packs of Egyptienne Luxury cigarettes. During a roughly four-year window from about 1910 to 1914, American tobacco companies produced a wave of collegiate premiums, and this particular Egyptienne Luxury series is notable for its quality: rather than a printed image, each piece is genuinely woven silk, reproducing a school's official seal in fine detail along with the institution's name beneath it. The series covered 150 American colleges and universities of the era, making individual schools like this one collectible both to tobacco advertising enthusiasts and to alumni and collectors of a specific institution.
This example features the seal of the Stevens Institute of Technology, the private engineering-focused college in Hoboken, New Jersey, founded in 1870 by the Stevens family, prominent innovators and engineers whose name is attached to numerous early American engineering and shipbuilding advances. The woven seal shows the classical armored bust design used in the school's official crest, encircled by the school's name and founding date "A.D. 1870," rendered here in fine detail on a rich crimson silk ground with gold and blue thread work, "STEVENS" woven boldly beneath in white. Faint reversed lettering is also visible along the lower edge of the silk, showing through from the reverse side, consistent with how these silks were woven and finished during production.
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