The Garfield desk lamp: a ceramic cat's head on a gooseneck, sold in a cardboard house

A ceramic cat's head, sculpted mid-scowl and glazed the color of a traffic cone, bolted to a gooseneck and sold in a cardboard house with a carry handle. The Prestigeline Garfield desk lamp is the rare licensed object where the packaging is the more useful artifact.

A lamp company that bought a cat

Prestigeline was not a toy company. Founded in 1949 and operating out of Long Island — the box gives 5 Inez Drive, Brentwood, New York, an address the firm later listed as Bay Shore — it spent the 1960s and 1970s making the sort of lighting that turns up in mid-century sale listings today: hi-intensity bullet lamps that folded into a pill shape, atomic egg lamps in orange, brass executive desk pieces. Competent, unglamorous, well built. The lamps still work, which is more than most of that era's desk lighting can claim.

Then, at the height of the licensing boom that followed Jim Davis's strip, Prestigeline did what a great many American manufacturers did between 1978 and 1983: it took out a license on an orange cat and applied it to the thing it already knew how to make. The result was a full home lighting program — not a novelty item, a program — sold under the banner Garfield Fat Cat Home Lighting and Accessories, with the tagline printed on the carton: Prestigeline is turning Garfield on, and now you can too.

The engineering shows the difference. The base is weighted steel with baked enamel, in the same orange as the cat, so the lamp does not tip when the gooseneck is swung out. The neck is a proper flexible conduit, sleeved to match. And the shade — the part that does the selling — is a hollow ceramic casting of Garfield's head and folded arms, hand-painted, sitting over the bulb so the light spills down through his chin onto the desk. He glares at your homework. That was the whole pitch.

The box is the reference work

Prestigeline packed the lamp in a carton shaped like a suburban house, complete with a gray shingled roof, white picket fence along the bottom edge, brick gable, window boxes of red flowers, and a translucent plastic carry handle at the ridgeline. A hang tag on a string reads 100% Pure Garfield. It is a considerable amount of print design for a modest desk lamp, and it is the reason the packaging survives at all — nobody flattens a cardboard house.

One end panel of that house is where the value sits for collectors. Prestigeline printed the rest of the line there, each item photographed in its own little window with the model number underneath. Read off an intact box and you have the series:

Model	Item
PT-5655	Desk lamp — the gooseneck with the ceramic head shade
PT-5664	Off-the-Wall — Garfield clinging to a wall plaque
PT-5662	Pin-up lamp
PT-5659	Out-on-a-Limb
PT-5657 / PT-5658	Nite-lite, automatic and on/off versions
PT-5665	Party lamp — figural base with a fabric shade
PT-5653	Water Sports — printed shade over a column base
PT-5667	Party swag
PT-5650	Nite-lite, cloud
PT-5651	Ceiling fixture

Ten items, sold as a coordinated range, with a ceiling fixture and a swag lamp in it. This was aimed at outfitting an entire child's bedroom, and it is a useful corrective to the way licensed goods of the period are usually remembered. The strip was not merely stamped on things. For a few years around 1981, a manufacturer in Brentwood was designing a Garfield room.

1978 is not the year

Almost every Garfield object carries a 1978 copyright line for United Feature Syndicate, and almost every listing repeats it as a date. It is not one. That line establishes ownership of the character, which debuted in newspapers on June 19, 1978, and it was printed on licensed goods for well over a decade afterward. We have made this argument at more length in the guide to the Garfield aquarium, where the same copyright line sits on a product made around 1990.

For this lamp, the working date is 1981. That is the year sellers with original paperwork consistently list, including those offering unused replacement ceramic shades still in Prestigeline packaging, and it sits comfortably inside the window when the character's licensing program was at full extension — the same stretch that produced the Dakin plush and, a little later, the Tyco telephone.

What one costs

The desk lamp is not rare, but it is not common either, and it lands in the awkward middle of the character-lighting market. Working examples with the ceramic shade intact have been offered in the neighborhood of $225, and lamps described as new in an opened box sit somewhat under that; a fair working price without the carton is nearer $100 to $150. The carton, being a cardboard house, roughly doubles a lamp's asking price when it survives with its hang tag.

The most instructive number in the category is not the lamp at all. Unused replacement ceramic shades, still in Prestigeline packaging, have been listed around $40 on their own. When a spare part carries a third of the value of the whole object, the market is telling you where the fragility is — and telling you to buy the intact shade and rewire the rest.

Reading one at an estate sale

• Run a finger around the rim of the shade. Chips hide under the lip where the ceramic meets the socket hardware, exactly where the seller's photograph never looks.
• Check the paint on the eyelids and the muzzle. The black outlines and the pale green of the eyes are hand-applied and thin. Wear there reads as a faded, blurry cat from across a room.
• Flex the gooseneck once, gently. It should hold the position you leave it in. A neck that sags is a spent conduit, and replacing it means separating the base from the shade.
• Look at the base underside for the Prestigeline label. The paper label carries the model number and the bulb rating. A missing label is not fatal, but it is one fewer thing to argue with.
• If the box is there, buy the box. Even a scuffed, crushed house roughly doubles the object, and the end panel is the only printed record of what else Prestigeline made.

Why it holds up

Character lighting is a graveyard of good intentions — most of it is a molded figure with a bulb behind it, and the design does nothing a decal could not have done. This one is different for a reason worth stating plainly: the joke and the function are the same gesture. A gooseneck desk lamp exists to point light where you need it, and here the light is pointed by a cat who could not be less interested in helping you. He looks down at the work with his arms folded. The lamp is genuinely good at being a lamp, and the sculpture only makes sense because of what the lamp does.

That is the standard the better licensed objects of the period met, and it is why the Prestigeline Garfield survives on desks rather than in bins — alongside the Tyco telephone, whose eyes open when you lift the handset, and a step above the many things from those years that were simply orange. If you collect period lighting, it belongs in the same conversation as the ceramic TV lamp: a figural ceramic object that had a job to do, and did it.