Hi All. This has got me thinking ....
We know that snuffbottles were primiraily used for SNUFF, just like mobile phones these days are used to talk to each other. I use just the cheapest Nokia, several years out of date. But my PA only buys the latest iPhone ! When we give gifts to our customers in China we use the latest iPhones and iPads It was only when snuff bottles developed in to 19th C business gifts that ther arose a generation of true artists whose bottles were never used for snuff, but just for display. " Hey ! - my i-ZLY is a later and better version than your i-MSX"
So alongside the few acknowldeged "greats" there must have been a whole cottage industry turning out commercial grade bottles with some minimal decoration for real snuff use. ( Pat tells me he has bottles which actualy do contain residual snuff particles ! QED) As usual with commercial grade stuff, it's never valued at the time do finally very examples finally survive . Thus the 3 - rail Hornby 00 gauge toy train set I palyed with as a kid 50 years ago is now very rare and sells for several hundred USD on ebay. Very hard to fake that !
So doubtless there are many genuine commercial grade bottles 100 years old, unsigned but very beautiful, and therefore a collector's genre in their own right. The only problem is the Chinese innate ability to copy ( did you know that there even fake chicken EGGs for sale !!!!! ) so as soon as antique commercial grade bottles become popular there will surely be a factory turning out copies which are ( almost) as good as the original. I don't know how the experts differentiate between a fake and real ZLY or MSX, but they can do so ( but also provenance surely counts heavily, especially when these bottles change hands for USD tens of thousands ) . But equally, there is a group of collectors who collect the genuine antique commercial grade bottles as an art form in its own right, and rightly so , because they are collector's items and often very beautiful, as well as comparatively rare.