Antique Snuff Boxes
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Where There's Smoke There's a Vintage Cigarette Lighter
By Maribeth Keane — At the very beginning, my interest in lighters was about the mechanism. I had my first lighter when I was 14. I saved up my nickels and dimes. I grew up in Oakland, and bought my first cigarette lighter because I thought it was way cool. I didn’t smoke and I didn’t set fire to things. I just thought the lighter was really a beautiful piece of equipment and the whole idea of being able to push down your thumb and get a flame just really caught my fancy. I was attracted to the function of...
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American Naval Snuff Boxes
By Thomas Hamilton Ormsbee — Papier-mache, despite its French name, originated in China where it was made for many generations before its European advent. It became an industry in England in 1772 when Henry Clay of Birmingham took out a patent for its making and so reaped a fortune. As a result he became not only a man of substance but later county magistrate and high sheriff of Warwickshire. This is not surprising for he had produced the inexpensive plastic of the day since it could easily be molded into desired...
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The Right Snuff: Decoding Chinese Snuff Bottles
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...
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Collecting Vintage Cigarette Lighters
By Eric Beeson — Cigarette lighter collecting is a hobby that never gets boring. Just by browsing eBay auctions for ten minutes, for example, I recently found a lighter shaped like a lion’s head, one made of jade and gold, and an electric lighter in the shape of a woman’s face that hangs on the wall. A flame we can carry in our pockets is something that we take for granted, but it was much harder to make fire in earlier times. The match wasn’t invented until about 1805, and early matches were expensive...