Smoking accessories are the objects made for storing, preparing, lighting and enjoying tobacco. The field includes pipes and pipe racks, tobacco jars and boxes, snuff boxes, cigar and cigarette boxes, humidors, cigar cutters, vesta cases and match strikers, ashtrays, lighters and the smoker's cabinets and stands found in Victorian and Edwardian smoking rooms.
As tobacco became a fashionable pleasure from the seventeenth century, craftsmen produced accessories in silver, brass, horn, wood, porcelain, enamel and later Bakelite. Snuff taking dominated the eighteenth century, while the nineteenth century brought cigars, cigarettes and the gentleman's smoking room with its own furniture and fittings. Notable makers include English and Continental silversmiths, Black Forest carvers of novelty figures, Austrian bronze workshops and twentieth-century firms such as Dunhill and Cartier, whose lighters and boxes are widely collected. Collectors value quality materials, maker's marks, novelty designs and good condition, including working mechanisms on lighters and well-fitted lids on boxes. Today many smoking accessories are used for other purposes, with humidors and cigarette boxes repurposed for jewellery or stationery, and they bring character to a library, study or bar.
