By Maribeth Keane — In 1978, I found a snuff bottle and didn’t know what it was. It intrigued me, so I bought it. Then I found some books about snuff bottles, and learned a bit about them and began looking for them. They’re all small; almost none are taller than 3 inches. And they’re made of all kinds of materials, from glass to jade, agate, precious stones such as tourmaline, even ruby matrix, amethyst, porcelain. They’re a microcosm of the craftsmanship of Chinese artisans. Chinese snuff bottles were only...

Bill Lindsey on How To Read a Bottle

By Maribeth Keane — My maternal grandfather and uncle got into bottles in about 1965 or ‘66 when I was in high school, and we started digging. My uncle was in Arizona, near some of the old mining camps there. Those were the glory days of bottle digging. People had access with four-wheel drive vehicles and gas was cheap and time-off was more abundant. Then years passed and people started really hitting the ghost towns and mining camps and logging camps of the West. Anyway, we started by digging some of the...