The Camel label

'Camels, it seems, hit the national market in 1914. . . . These particular cigarettes, an innovative blend of Virginia burley and Carolina bright with imported Turkish leaf included for taste and aroma, and with a generous amount of sweetening added, were created personally by R.J. (Richard Joshua) Reynolds in Winston-Salem, N.C., the previous year. The package also was designed in 1913. It was Mr. Reynolds's idea to name the new cigarettes 'Kamel' or 'Camel' to give them an exotic mystique befitting their Turkish ingredient, and it was Reynolds's young secretary, Roy C. Haberkern, who talked Barnum & Bailey into letting him photograph Old Joe, the cantankerous circus dromedary, for the title role on the pack. Who placed the pyramids in the background is unclear. The Camel label had been prepared for Reynolds by a Richmond lithography firm, and it was believed that an itinerant lithographer newly in the firm's employ applied the finishing detail, including the pyramids, shortly before he walked off the job. Nobody remembered his name, but they recalled that he was a talented draftsman and had flaming red hair.'

'Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.