When I went online to find more information, I was amazed to find that snowglobe collectors have invaded the Web in force! There are a vast number of sites for both individual collectors and commercial resources.
Several versions of the origin of the snowglobe exist. Variously, they seem to date to the 1800's in France, an outgrowth of paperweights. By 1879 they were popular enough for five manufacturers to begin shipping them throughout Europe. Or, "The earliest (domes) were made as paperweights during the 1920s in Germany and in America by the Atlas Crystal Works, and were leaded glass spheres set atop cast ceramic bases," according to cultural historians Jane and Michael Stern in their seminal work, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.
Connie A. Moore and Harry L. Rinker's book "Snow Globes: The Collector's Guide to Selecting, Displaying and Restoring Snow Globes," is a valuable guide to not only modern-day globes and domes, but their often obscure history. They write that the earliest snow domes, made of glass, were part of the 1870s lifestyle of upper-class Victorian families who had a love of kitsch, knickknacks and souvenirs. Plastic snow domes began their current reign in the 1950s.
Whenever the snowglobe first appeared, the concept is very clever. Whether made of plastic, with cheesy toy figures and plastic flakes, or heavy glass with music box in the base, these miniature "worlds" instantly return us to the wonder of our childhoods. We can imagine ourselves within the silent landscape, perpetually winter, moving among dancing flakes that never turn into slush or need to be shoveled! "The movie that many critics consider the best American film of all time begins with one. Charles Foster Kane holds out a glass, water-filled globe depicting a bucolic snowy landscape, utters his famous final word "Rosebud" and slowly expires. The snowglobe rolls from his dead fingers and smashes on the floor. Again and again throughout Citizen Kane, the globe subtly reappears..." Justin Cord Hayes points out in his Las Vegas Weekly article "Shaken, Not Stirred" of January 27, 1999.
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