How many come up for sale each year?

Around ten cigar boxes come to market on Sellingantiques in a year, drawn from 91 listings across the archive. Forty-seven different dealers have listed one, close to one dealer per two boxes. Almost nobody stocks them in depth, so they arrive singly rather than in runs.

What period do most of them come from?

The dated field runs from 1860 to 1940, and 40 of the 91 listings carry a clean year. The rest are given only as "19th Century", "Victorian" or "Edwardian". Those three labels overlap rather than divide the century neatly. A box called "19th Century" may sit anywhere across sixty years.

Are Georgian or Regency cigar boxes found?

A handful of sampled pieces carry Georgian or Regency attributions around 1820, earlier than the dated field's own 1860 floor. They are the outliers of the archive, and the date is the dealer's attribution rather than a documented year.

Is a humidor different from a cigar box?

Strictly, a humidor is the lined, close-fitting box built to hold humidity, developed later in the nineteenth century as a refinement of the plain lidded casket. In practice the word is used loosely. It appears in about a third of titles, alongside cigar box, smoker's box and cigar cabinet, often for the same kind of object.

Which novelty shapes turn up?

Dog kennels in rosewood and oak, railway coal wagons including a Great Western Railway one, a book, a carriage and a leather trunk. A carved Black Forest bear sits alongside them. Musical and mechanically automated boxes are far scarcer, with two examples across the whole archive.

Do any come from outside Britain?

English is named in 11 titles, and French, Continental and Black Forest pieces appear a few times each. The rarest origins to surface are a single Chinese brass and cloisonné box, a single Viennese box, and a Kashmiri Anglo-Indian carved walnut example.