Antique "Our Kitties" Cigar Box Label 🐾 Gold Embossed Chromolithograph Cats, Early 1900s

Ever wonder why the cigar box in Grandpa's attic was too pretty to throw away? 🐾

Long before color televisions, glossy magazine spreads, or a single billboard ever lit up a highway, a scrap of paper glued inside a wooden cigar box was doing the heaviest lifting in American advertising. This little corner of commercial art — gold-embossed lettering, hand-tooled scrollwork, cats rendered with more care than most portrait painters gave to people — is exactly the kind of thing that got tucked into a drawer "just in case," and decades later turns up looking almost exactly as it did the day it left the printer. That's the story sitting in front of you here: an "Our Kitties" cigar box label, a small paper survivor from the last great age of stone lithography, when a cigar company's entire personality had to be captured in a single rectangle of ink and gold leaf.

This is an original "Our Kitties" inner cigar box label, printed by chromolithograph with raised gold embossing, styled in the ornate Art Nouveau ribbon-and-medallion fashion that defined cigar box art in the 1900s–1910s. The design centers on two long-haired, Persian-type cats — one jet black, one pale cream — seated in profile and facing one another atop a tasseled red cushion, a soft green woodland drapery behind them and a gilt trellis border running along the base.

Overhead, the words "OUR KITTIES" arch across the top in embossed gold lettering outlined in green, cradled by a pale blue ribbon banner edged in gold beadwork. On either side, matching blue rosette medallions carry small embossed portrait profiles in gold, flanking the central scene like a pair of miniature award seals.

Below the oval frame, in fine print, the label reads "TITLE & DESIGN REGISTERED" — the era's way of staking a legal claim to exactly this kind of artwork. The whole composition sits on a faux wood-grain background, meant to echo the cedar of the cigar box lid it was designed to dress. This example is New Old Stock — surplus printer's inventory that outlived the cigar boxes it was manufactured for, never having gone to work on a factory production line before ending up preserved as a standalone piece of paper ephemera.

🎩 The Golden Age of the Cigar Box Label

To understand why so much artistry went into something as disposable as the inside of a cigar box, you have to picture the American tobacco counter around the turn of the last century. Hundreds — eventually thousands — of small cigar manufacturers were competing for the same shelf space in the same tobacco shops, drugstores, and general stores, and nearly all of them were selling more or less the same product: rolled tobacco leaf in a wooden box. There was no radio jingle, no magazine spread, no neon sign to set one brand apart from another. What there was, instead, was the label. The box lid — inside and out — became the entire advertisement, and manufacturers poured money into hiring the great lithography houses of New York and Philadelphia to make sure their box was the one a customer's eye landed on first.

The technical process behind a label like this one was genuinely elaborate. Chromolithography meant building up an image one color at a time from separate hand-drawn stone plates, each stone inked and pressed in careful register with the last, so that a single label might pass through the press a dozen times before it was finished. Gold wasn't painted on — it was embossed, stamped into relief with heavy metal dies so that the lettering and ribbon work would actually catch the light and cast a shadow, exactly the effect you can still see in the raised "OUR KITTIES" title and the beaded blue trim framing these two cats. It was, in every sense, a miniature engraving shop's worth of craftsmanship squeezed onto a sheet of paper meant to be folded inside a wooden box.

Notice, too, the little phrase tucked beneath the scene: "Title & Design Registered." This was standard practice across the trade — a manufacturer registering the exact title and artwork of a label to keep a rival cigar maker from lifting a popular design and slapping it on a competing box. Cats, dogs, patriotic eagles, exposition medals, cameo portraits of statesmen and generals — these were the stock currency of cigar label art, and the little gold medallions flanking "Our Kitties" here, each bearing an embossed profile portrait, echo a convention borrowed straight from world's fair exposition medals. A manufacturer didn't need to have actually won a prize to dress their label like one; the visual language of a medal, a ribbon, and a laurel was simply understood by 1900s shoppers as shorthand for quality.

🐈 Why Cats? The Age of the Cat Fancy

It's easy to look at two fluffy cats posed on a velvet cushion and assume it's simply a cute picture chosen to catch the eye — and it is that. But it's worth knowing that this image landed on tobacco counters at the exact moment America and Britain were falling head over heels for a very particular kind of cat. Long-haired Persian-type cats had shot up the social ladder through the second half of the 1800s, helped enormously by Queen Victoria's own well-publicized fondness for her blue Persian cats. The first organized cat show in the world had been staged at London's Crystal Palace back in 1871, and by the turn of the century, "cat fancy" clubs judging pedigree cats on their coats, coloring, and bearing had become a genuine society fashion on both sides of the Atlantic.

A cigar brand looking to signal refinement, comfort, and a touch of upper-crust leisure could hardly have picked a better emblem than two show-quality Persian cats seated on a tasseled cushion in a woodland drawing room. It placed the smoker — at least in the imagination — somewhere warm and cultivated, a parlor rather than a factory floor. The choice to render one cat in deep black and the other in pale cream wasn't accidental either; artists of the period loved this kind of mirrored contrast, a visual rhyme that made the label instantly memorable on a crowded shelf even at a glance. Collectors of Victorian and Edwardian ephemera today often note how frequently cats, and especially this kind of long-haired "fancy" cat, turn up on trade cards, advent calendars, and cigar labels of the era — a small but telling window into just how thoroughly cat culture had captured the popular imagination.

🏭 A Name Cigar Men Knew

Cigar manufacturing in this period was rarely the province of a single giant company. It was, instead, an enormous patchwork of small and mid-sized factories, many family-run, each ordering labels either as fully custom artwork or — just as often — as a "stock" design purchased from a lithography house's existing catalog and simply overprinted with a manufacturer's own name and city. Cats, kittens, and other charming domestic scenes were a favorite category of stock design precisely because they had broad appeal and no controversial politics attached to them, unlike so many of the era's patriotic or portrait-driven labels.

Dealers who have spent years handling this specific category of ephemera will tell you that "Our Kitties" is a name that keeps turning up — one of those titles that has circulated long enough in cigar label reference material and specialist inventories that seasoned collectors recognize it on sight, the way a stamp collector recognizes a particular commemorative issue without needing to look it up. That kind of recognition builds slowly, over decades of dealers and collectors passing labels like this one back and forth at paper shows and through specialty galleries, and it's part of what gives a piece like "Our Kitties" its quiet standing in the hobby even without a single famous factory attached to its name.

📦 Saved Instead of Smoked: Why These Survive

Here's the part of the story that a lot of people don't expect: cigar boxes almost never survived intact for long, but that's precisely why the box itself became a treasured object in American households. Once emptied, a well-made wooden cigar box with a handsome label was too good to throw in the stove. Households kept them for sewing notions, fishing tackle, love letters, marbles, buttons, tobacco of a different sort, or a child's very first "treasure box." The label glued to the lid was often the whole reason a box got saved in the first place — it turned a piece of packaging into a small piece of parlor decoration.

What you're looking at here, though, tells a slightly different and rarer story. A label that survives as New Old Stock never went through any of that. It never rode inside a factory crate to a tobacco shop, never got pasted onto a lid, never spent years absorbing handling in someone's workshop drawer. It sat instead in a printer's or jobber's surplus stock, bypassed by time, until it resurfaced exactly as the lithographer intended it to look the day it came off the press — full color, full gold, and complete. That's a meaningfully different kind of survivor than a label peeled off a used box, and it's a large part of why loose, uncirculated cigar label stock like this has become such a prized little corner of the ephemera-collecting world. Chromolithography of this depth and gold embossing work of this quality represents a genuine high point of American commercial printing, a craft that took real skill, time, and expensive equipment to produce — which is exactly why pieces like this are treated today as small, standalone works of folk art rather than mere packaging.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🖼️ Float it in a simple shadow box frame so the raised gold embossing catches the light from across the room
• 🐈‍⬛ Pair it with other cat-themed advertising ephemera for a themed gallery wall in a reading nook or study
• 📚 Slip it into an archival sleeve and file it alongside other cigar label and tobacco advertising pieces in a reference collection
• 🎀 Frame it near a Victorian or Edwardian-era mirror or vanity for a matching turn-of-the-century parlor look
• 🎁 Give it to the cat lover in your life who also happens to collect old advertising, trade cards, or vintage paper
• 🕯️ Set it on a mantel easel as a rotating conversation piece alongside other small antique curiosities

🎁 Who Collects These

"Our Kitties" sits right at the crossroads of two very active collecting worlds, which is part of what makes it such fun to place in a good home. Cigar label and tobacco advertising collectors seek out surviving inner-lid art specifically for its lithographic quality and gold embossing, treating labels like this as small works of commercial art history worth preserving on their own terms. At the same time, cat collectibles enthusiasts — the folks who gather everything from Victorian cat postcards to antique cat figurines — are always hunting for period pieces where the cat itself is the whole reason for the artwork, not just a background detail. Add in general Americana and ephemera collectors who love anything with rich embossing, gilt lettering, and turn-of-the-century flourish, and you've got a piece with genuinely broad appeal — as at home in a themed cat collection as it is in a folder of vintage advertising art.

❓ FAQ

What exactly is a cigar box "label" like this one?
It's the decorative paper artwork produced to dress the inside lid of a wooden cigar box — the manufacturer's branding, essentially, printed and embossed by a specialty lithography house rather than by the cigar company itself.

How old is this piece?
The style — heavy stone chromolithography, deep gold embossing, Art Nouveau ribbon framing, and faux wood-grain backgrounds — places it in the 1900s–1910s, the height of this particular school of American advertising art.

Was "Our Kitties" a well-known cigar brand?
It's a name that longtime cigar label dealers and collectors recognize from years of handling this category of material and from the reference guides the hobby relies on — the kind of familiarity that builds up over decades of a design circulating among specialists.

What does it mean that this is "New Old Stock"?
It means this label survives as original surplus printer's inventory rather than having spent its life pasted to a working cigar box — old, but never put into service.

Why two cats, and why one black and one white?
Mirrored, contrasting pairs like this were a favorite device in period advertising art — visually striking, instantly balanced, and an easy way to make a label stand out at a glance on a crowded tobacco counter.

What are the little medallions with the portrait profiles?
They follow a common cigar label convention borrowed from world's fair exposition medals — a decorative shorthand for quality and distinction that many manufacturers used whether or not an actual prize was ever awarded.

Is this good for framing?
Very much so — the raised gold embossing and rich color separation were designed to be seen up close, which is exactly what a simple frame lets you do.