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Posted By: Jon Canfield

I had some spare time at work today, so I played a little with that writing imprinted on the back of the Cobb card. To start off with, I changed the brightness and the contrast to brighten the background and dull out the stats and bibliographical writing on the back of the CJ. I then filtered out all colors to get a “raw negative” of the back, again to try to focus in on the lettering imprinted. Finally, I rendered the picture and got a reverse, or mirror image, of the writing – so now it reads correctly. Below is a picture of how the card looked having applied these steps…



Next, I began the task of trying to figure out what the letters imprinted on the Cobb were, and what they meant. Immediately I could make out the middle word as being “DE”. This clued me into the wording being in Spanish – go figure, I took Latin for 6 years! Looking at the first word, I was pretty confident the letters were “BRICA”. Now, the third word was the most troublesome… I could make out a faint A for the 2nd letter. I could also see that the last three letters were “ACO”. So, putting what I could see together, I had “BRICA DE _A_ACO”.

After playing around in my head what these words could possibly mean, I came to the realization that this imprint would have most likely read “FABRICA DE TABACO”, which, in Spanish, I believe translates into Manufacturer of Tobacco. So, after all is said and done, and after an hour of my time, I now realize that the writing is not a cigar brand, but rather just part of the label. Oh well, guess my idea of verifying the tobacco brand still doesn’t clue us in to the legitimacy of the card.