Antique White-Cat 🐱 Cigar Box Label 1920s Embossed Gold Chromolithograph Tobacco Art

Why Does the Cat Own the White-Cat Cigar? White-Cat: The Cigar Label Where the Cat Owns the Cigar 😺

Size: 9" x 7"

Cigar labels of the day crowded their lids with senators, eagles, generals and Spanish beauties. White-Cat put a long-haired white cat flat on top of the cigar itself, stretched out behind the band and staring straight back at the smoker as if the whole box belonged to it. This is the brand's inner lid label from the 1920s, gold embossed, printed by the Brooklyn house that swallowed up the old label giants, and never glued into a box.

What This Label Is

An antique inner cigar box label, 9" x 7", printed in full color with gold and raised embossing. Printed and pictured on it:

• "White-Cat" in red letters edged in gold, arched across the top
• a long-haired white cat of the Persian type lying along a brown cigar
• a round red and gold band on the cigar reading "White CAT"
• STANDARD QUALITY in gold capitals under the cigar
• a gold arrow-and-rule ornament below that
• a shaded blue oval behind the cat and cigar
• "White-Cat" repeated in red and gold along the bottom
• a tiny printer's line along the bottom edge: Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, Brooklyn, N.Y.

The back is plain paper with the whole design pressed through in reverse, a good measure of how deep the embossing runs. There is no glue and no wood on it. The label was never used.

I also like what this lid doesn't say. Plenty of cigar labels of the day leaned on the word Havana, with lines like "Pure Havana" or "Clear Havana" (the trade's name for an American-made cigar rolled from Cuban leaf), and that word carried real weight. In 1939 the Federal Trade Commission ordered a Greensboro, North Carolina cigar company to stop printing "Havana" on boxes of cigars made entirely from American-grown tobacco, and the federal appeals court backed the order, finding that on a cigar label the word meant the cigar was made, at least in part, from tobacco grown in Cuba. White-Cat makes no Havana claim at all. It says STANDARD QUALITY and lets the cat do the selling.

🖨️ The Printer: Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, Brooklyn

That small line of type at the bottom edge is the most important thing on the label after the cat. Consolidated Lithographing Corporation was founded by Jacob A. Voice, born in Romania in 1884 and brought to America at the age of three. He went to work for the Brooklyn lithographers Wm. Steiner & Sons in 1903, had a company of his own by 1911, and around 1925 merged it with Steiner, a house that went back to Steiner & Rosenthal of 1884, to form Consolidated.

The name was earned. Consolidated went on to absorb some of the most famous label printers in the country, among them Schmidt & Company, Heywood, Strasser & Voigt, and the American Lithographic Company, whose cigar label business passed to Consolidated in 1930. The proof books those firms kept of their work survive today in the collections of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The printer's name is also the label's best clue to its age. The Consolidated name dates from about 1925, so this White-Cat printing is from the mid-1920s or later, the last years of the embossed gold cigar label.

📜 Why Cigars Came in Labeled Boxes

The Revenue Act of 1865 required every cigar sold in the United States, foreign or domestic, to be packed in a wooden box of 25, 50, 100 or 250, which gave revenue agents a place to paste the tax stamp. Once cigar boxes sat open on humidified store counters, one brand's box looked much like the next, and the inside of the lid became the place to win the sale. After 1890, extra press runs added embossing and gilding, the gold dusted on as bronze powder and buffed to a shine.

A handful of lithographers, most of them German immigrants, in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Philadelphia printed roughly 80 percent of all American cigar labels, and the golden age peaked between about 1900 and 1920. After 1920 the trade turned: photoengraving made labels cheaper and plainer, cigarettes pulled smokers away, and within ten years most American cigar factories had shut. The label houses merged to survive, and Consolidated was the company that gathered them in.

🐈 The White Persian: A Victorian Status Cat

The cat on this label is no barn cat. Long-haired white cats of the Persian and Angora kind were the prize pets of the late Victorian age. Harrison Weir, remembered as the father of the cat fancy, staged the first organized cat show at London's Crystal Palace in July 1871, and long-haired Persians were among the cats on the benches. America's first big cat show followed at Madison Square Garden in May 1895. Early American breeders raised Persians and Angoras as status pets, and white Persians were prominent at the early Chicago shows. White-Cat put one on its lid.

🍀 White Cats in Folklore

Superstition never could agree about white cats. In parts of North America a white cat crossing your path was counted as good luck, though seeing one at night was not. Old British superstition turned the colors around, holding black cats lucky and treating a white cat coming to the door as a sign of hard times ahead. A smoker opening a box of White-Cats could take his pick.

📦 How Unused Labels Survived

Cigar makers, box makers and printers all ended up with bundles of labels that never reached a box. Many sat untouched in warehouses and print shops for decades until they were rediscovered in the 1970s, and through the 1980s unused labels spread into collections across the country. This one never met a box either.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🖼️ A shadow box with a spacer, so the glass never presses the raised gold and lettering
• 🐱 The centerpiece of a cat art wall
• 🚬 Beside an old cigar box, cutter or humidor in a den or study
• 🗽 With other Brooklyn-printed labels in a New York printing history grouping

🎁 Who Collects These

Cigar label and tobacciana collectors, who follow the printing houses as closely as the brands. Cat lovers and collectors of antique cat art. Students of American lithography and commercial printing. Brooklyn and New York history collectors. And anyone who wants an original piece of 1920s advertising art with a cat that looks like it has opinions.

❓ Questions People Ask

How big is the label?

9" x 7".

Who printed it?

Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn, New York. Its name is printed in small type along the bottom edge.

How old is it?

It is from the 1920s. The printer took the Consolidated name around 1925.

Was it ever used on a cigar box?

No. The back is clean paper with no glue or wood.

Why can I see the design on the back?

The embossing pressed the lettering, the cat and the cigar up from behind, so the design shows through in reverse.

What is an inner label?

The large label glued inside the lid of a cigar box, seen by the buyer the moment the box was opened on the store counter.

What kind of cat is it?

A long-haired white cat of the Persian type, the most fashionable kind of pet cat of its era.