Cigars and The History of Bachelor Parties As with most marriage customs, it's hard to pin down exactly when and how the bachelor party developed. Some writers compare them to Viking funerals-just as those ancient warriors robustly celebrated the life of a fallen comrade, sending him... ( added 221 days 2 hours ago.)

Cigars 2.0: Facebook For The Cigar Lover In a few short years, Facebook.com has become a popular social-networking web site. Its clean, attractive layout, fun games, and (comparative) privacy make the site inviting to users who don't necessarily want to spend their entire lives... ( added 262 days 1 hour ago.)

Four Famous Fictional Cigar Smokers Cigar smoking enjoyed an abrupt, and steep, spike in popularity during the 1990s, after years of decline. Cigar bars and shops sprang up even in midsize towns and cities, while profits experienced heady growth. But during all the years between the... ( added 262 days 2 hours ago.)

How To Build A Cigar Memorabilia Collection Many cigar smokers throw out those paper bands encircling their favorite stogies on the way to smoking them. As for the boxes the cigars come in-what about them? Old cigar advertisements, humidors that no longer humidify, and other cigar-related... ( added 262 days 2 hours ago.)

Cigar-Loving Heroes Of Television It's tough being a TV character. Whether you're a crime-solving supersleuth or a wacky next door neighbor, the pressures are intense-villains that refuse to be caught, friends who don't share your enthusiasm for celebrating Festivus. When... ( added 262 days 2 hours ago.)

Around The World In Three Tobaccos Many of us live, and think, as if "nature" and "culture" were separate things, kept apart by a porous but clear boundary. In fact, it's usually hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. (Think of the ways most of us encounter nature-we... ( added 262 days 2 hours ago.)

What To Do With A Misbehaving Cigar The best-laid plans of mice and men. Even the most careful cigar smoker - the one who only buys premium cigars, keeps them stored in a humidor at around seventy percent relative humidity, and lights them slowly and carefully, turning the cigar in... ( added 279 days 2 hours ago.)

How To Smoke Premium Cigars: Deciding Where To Start For the past fifteen years or so, the market for this once-nearly-moribund luxury has been on an impressive rebound. From its height in the 1850s - when Cuba alone exported 356.6 million cigars - until the early 1990s, the cigar market had badly... ( added 279 days 2 hours ago.)

Mixing It Up: Food And Drinks That Go Well With Cigars Premium cigars are many peoples' idea of the ultimate inexpensive luxury item. So with more and more Americans putting more thought into their meals - as the proliferation of magazines such as Food and Wine, Cook's Illustrated and Food, as well as... ( added 279 days 2 hours ago.)

The Proper Care and Feeding Of Cigars Picture this: You're going to have dinner at the home of a famous wine collector - somebody famous for the quality and discrimination of his or her palate, perhaps a wealthy person who can afford to buy those vintages the rest of us can only dream... ( added 279 days 2 hours ago.)

A Rich Variety: How To Choose Your First Premium Cigar The rebounding of the premium-cigar market is one of the oddest business success stories of the past fifteen years. With an aging customer base, decades of competition from cigarettes and overall consumer trends indicating a decline in smoking in... ( added 279 days 2 hours ago.)

Novelty Cigar Boxes: The Second Wave From mug-shaped cigar boxes to gameboard boxes, the cigar makers of the world have shown great creativity in packaging their wares, and no period was more fertile for the cigar-box collector as that from 1878 to the early twentieth century. (All... ( added 332 days 1 hour ago.)

Going, Going, Gone...Through The Roof!: Cigar Prices At Auction Perhaps today's multimillion-dollar cigar auction world would never have come to exist, if it hadn't been for arch anticapitalist Fidel Castro. After all, it was Castro's overthrowing of US-backed dictator Juan Batista, followed by his... ( added 332 days 1 hour ago.)

A Global History Of Tobacco Tobacco's history goes back too far to trace. Paleontologists project that it may have begun growing in the Americas as long as 8000 years ago, and archaeological data indicates that folks have been smoking it, one way or another, four almost four... ( added 332 days 1 hour ago.)

It's A Small World: Tobaccos From Around The Globe Most nonsmokers think of tobacco plants as interchangeable - if you've smoked one, you've smoked 'em all. But as anyone knows who has ever compared the taste of a premium cigar to a cheap one - or who has visited the Middle East, where an... ( added 332 days 1 hour ago.)

Log Cabins And Lincoln Rear Ends: The Strange World Of Collectible Cigar Boxes When cigar giant CAO announced a special, officially-licensed cigar commemorating the long-running TV show The Sopranos, the combination seemed to make sense. What's less surprising than a cigar company saluting a universally-hailed TV show, whose... ( added 332 days 1 hour ago.)

The Cigar Boom: What It Was (And Is) As the 1990s dawned, few industries seemed deader than cigar sales and manufacture. From its height in the 1850s - when Cuba alone exported 356.6 million cigars - the cigar had fallen into virtual moribundity. Its market had been conquered by... ( added 332 days 1 hour ago.)

Don't Get Taken By A Counterfeit Cuban Great cigars can be made anywhere, of course. But just as Detroit makes us think of cars and Hollywood reminds us of movies, cigar smokers often think of Cuba as the apex of cigar-making. Why Cuba? As with so much of history, the answer has to do... ( added 343 days 1 hour ago.)

Iconic Females Who Enjoyed Cigars Who comes to mind when you hear the word "cigar" smoker? If you're like too many people - most of them nonsmokers - you imagine a well-dressed male, perhaps wearing a sweater vest, someone - no matter what age - who exudes a certain personal... ( added 343 days 1 hour ago.)

Burning Down The House: How To Light A Cigar Like any essential, simple activity, lighting a cigar has been rendered an expensive process by modern capitalism. You might think a box of matches would do the trick, but why settle for little sticks of burning wood when you could be lighting... ( added 343 days 1 hour ago.)

Great Cigars of Honduras, Italy, Mexico and Nicaragua As we take a closer look at premium cigars from all over the world - those coming from both likely and unlikely regions - we pass on to Honduras, Italy, Mexico and Nicaragua. That's two world-class cigar-making regions that every smoker knows... ( added 343 days 1 hour ago.)

Women In The Cigar Industry: Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Smoke Maybe it's Victorianism. Or perhaps it's that '30s stereotype we all still have of cigar smokers as heavyset, overcoated, wealthy men, lighting their stogies with $100 bills. Or maybe it's even because of that folkloric Freudianism, still so... ( added 343 days 1 hour ago.)

Fine Cigars from Bahamas, Brazil, Dominican Republic and Greece Cigars come from all over the world. Why, then, do cigar aficionados so often limit themselves to a handful (literally) of well-regarded smokes from a few highly-regarded companies or regions? Perhaps like a passionate music fan visiting the... ( added 343 days 2 hours ago.)

Great Moments In Cigar History: The Nineteenth Century Some businesses are more romantic than others. For example, compare winemaking with toothpick-making. Now, the wine business is, on a day-by-day basis, anything but one ecstatic Cabernet Sauvignon after another. You have to handle distribution... ( added 343 days 2 hours ago.)

History and Popularity of Cigars Who smoked the first cigar? We'll never know, of course, but archeological finds suggest an early date indeed. A ceramic vessel unearthed at Uaxactun, Guatemala, dating from as early as the tenth century, depicts a cigar-smoking man, which... ( added 358 days 8 hours ago.)