Antique 1900s–1920s “White‑Cat” Wood‑Grain Cigar Box Label 😺 NOS

Remember White-Cat Cigar Boxes? 😺 The White-Cat in Working Clothes

Size: 9" x 7"

A long-haired white cat lies stretched along a cigar, one front paw resting over the band, and fixes the viewer with a flat, unbothered stare. Above it, White-Cat in arched black letters; below it, STANDARD QUALITY. No gold, no embossing, no rainbow of inks: the whole label is black line drawing on a printed wood-grain ground. The White-Cat name also turns up on a much fancier cigar label, embossed and bronzed with gold by Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn, New York. This one is a different printing altogether, and it carries no printer's name at all.

This is an unused White-Cat cigar box label from the early twentieth century, New Old Stock, 9" x 7" ~.

🔎 What Is on the Label

The lettering curves across the top in a bold serif, White-Cat, with a short hyphen between the words. The cat is drawn in fine pen-style hatching, its fur built up from short strokes, and it lies on a long tapered cigar whose band carries a dotted ring lettered "White CAT". Diagonal shading lines fan out behind the cat and beneath the cigar. STANDARD QUALITY runs along the bottom in clean capitals.

The background is printed to look like wood: fine reddish-brown grain lines streak across warm tan paper, so the sheet reads at a glance like a plank. The back is blank. Spanish cedar has long been called the best wood for cigar boxes, for its grain, its fine texture, its pleasant smell and its knack for keeping insects out, and a printed grain gives a paper label the look of wood.

🖨️ Two Ways to Print a Cat

Cigar box labels became commonplace in the middle of the 19th century, when chromolithography made color printing cheap enough for packaging. The showpieces used more than twenty colors printed one at a time, then embossing, then gold or bronze on the raised parts. By the 1920s fast presses running light metal plates were replacing the heavy Bavarian limestones the old labels had been drawn on.

The printing houses themselves kept changing hands. In 1892 Joseph Palmer Knapp rolled a string of the big cigar-label printers into one company, American Lithographic, with Harris, Heppenheimer, Donaldson Bros. and Schumacher & Ettlinger among them, to get a grip on the label trade. U.S. Printing & Lithograph bought American Litho in 1929, and a year later its cigar-label business was sold to Consolidated Lithographing.

The White-Cat name went both ways. Print dealers record a White-Cat "Standard Quality" label from Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, the Brooklyn house whose founder, Jacob A. Voice, Fortune magazine called America's foremost maker of cigar-box art in 1933. That one is a chromolithograph with embossing and gold bronzing and the printer's name in small type, and a White Cat outer end label from the same Brooklyn printer is recorded too, also embossed and gilded. The label offered here is the opposite approach: one drawing, black ink, a printed wood grain, no gilding, no relief and no imprint.

🐈 When a White Cat Was the Height of Fashion

A fluffy white cat was a fashionable thing to put on a label. A landmark of the cat fancy was the show at London's Crystal Palace in July 1871, credited to Harrison Weir, where between 150 and 211 cats were exhibited. America's first widely attended and successful show followed at Madison Square Garden in New York in May 1895, with 176 cats from 125 owners. Among the long-haired breeds, white was the most popular color in Angoras, and white Persians were shown in Chicago by Mrs. Clinton Locke and Mrs. Josiah Cratty. The cat on this label wears exactly that long white coat.

📜 Cats and Tobacco: The Black Cat Legend

Cats and tobacco share one famous legend. The story goes that a black cat spent hours asleep in the window of Don José Carreras's tobacco shop on Wardour Street in London, well before 1900, until the place became known as the "black cat shop". In 1886 the black cat became the first trademark registered by the Carreras Tobacco Company. When Carreras opened its Arcadia Works at Mornington Crescent in 1928, the first factory in Britain built with pre-stressed concrete, two bronze cats eight feet six inches tall, versions of the Egyptian goddess Bastet, stood guard at the entrance. They stayed until 1959, when one went to the company's Basildon factory and the other to its factory at Spanish Town, Jamaica.

Nothing on the White-Cat label names its maker or its town, so its own story lives in what is printed: a brand name, a grade, and a cat.

🚬 White Cat Today

A machine-made White Cat cigar is still sold, in blends such as Sweets and Black Gold. These days the name belongs to ITG Brands, the American arm of Britain's Imperial Brands; the little open-head cigarillos are made in the Dominican Republic, and today's White Cat sits in the same stable as Dutch Masters, Phillies and Antonio y Cleopatra. It shares a name with this label and belongs to another century of tobacco.

🖼️ Condition and Display

New Old Stock: printed, never used, never pasted to a box. The black line work is crisp and the grain is even. The neutral tan and black sit well in a natural wood or black frame, on a cabin or den wall, over a home bar, or in a cat lover's reading corner.

❓ Questions People Ask

How old is this White-Cat cigar label?

It is an early twentieth-century label, sold as New Old Stock. It carries no printer's imprint or factory line to narrow the date further.

Who printed it?

No printer's name appears anywhere on it. The embossed, gold-bronzed White-Cat label from Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn is a different printing.

Is this label embossed?

No. It is flat printing: black line art over a printed wood-grain background, with a blank back.

What size is it?

9" x 7" ~.

Is it connected to the White Cat cigars sold today?

Nothing printed on the label ties it to the modern machine-made brand; they share a name.