Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

The druggists and other tradesmen who sold tobacco in Elizabethan and Jacobean days had every provision for the convenience of their numerous customers. Some so-called druggists, it may be shrewdly suspected, did much more business in tobacco than they did in drugs. Dekker tells us of an apothecary and his wife who had no customers resorting to their shop "for any phisicall stuffe," but whose shop had many frequenters in the shape of gentlemen who "came to take their pipes of the divine smoake." That tobacco was often the most profitable part of a druggist's stock is also clear from the last sentence in Bishop Earle's character of "A Tobacco-Seller," one of the shortest in that remarkable collection of "Characters" which the Bishop issued in 1628 under the title of "Micro-Cosmographie."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

But the apothecaries were the most usual salesmen, and their shops and the ordinaries were the customary day meeting-places for the more fashionable smokers. The taverns and inns, however, were also filled with smoke, and taverns were frequented by men of all social grades. Dekker speaks of the gallant leaving the tavern at night when "the spirit of wine and tobacco walkes" in his train. On the occasion of the accession of James I, 1603, when London was given up to rejoicing and revelry, we are told that "tobacconists [i.e. smokers] filled up whole Tavernes."

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