The snowglobe is the quintessential tacky souvenir, on sale in shops from Svalbard, where it does snow, to Singapore, where it doesn’t.
They range from rough approximations of a local landmark with an inscription and a flurry of snow to bowling-ball-sized heirloom pieces with music and LED lighting. Taste and price are usually unrelated.
Who made the first snowglobe is a matter of contention. The Reports of the United States Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878 describe “paper weights of hollow balls filled with water, containing a man with an umbrella. These balls also contain a white powder, which, when the paper weight is turned upside down, falls in imitation of a snow storm.”
Sounds like a snowglobe. But it wasn’t until 1900 that Erwin Perzy, an Austrian mechanic, filed a patent for a Schneekugel he had invented in a moment of whimsy while researching ways to improve the brightness of lightbulbs. He stuck a miniature of the Mariazell Basilica, in Vienna, in a glass globe, added water and ground rice, and thus created the world’s kitschiest souvenir.
His grandson runs the business now, offering a range including snowmen, Father Christmases and Viennese landmarks under glass; prices range from £5.50 for a 1in model to £20 for a 4¾in one (Schumanngasse 87; viennasnowglobe.at).
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You’ll find vintage snowglobes on eBay for £140-plus, but the priciest these days are made by Leah Andrews, aka the Queen of Snowglobes (queenofsnowglobes.com). The Australian artist has made bespoke creations for Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino and the producers of the Netflix show Narcos, with bales of cocaine lending new meaning to the term snowglobe. And if you’d had a spare £3,270 last Christmas, models of you and your family could have been placed in a favourite location, to be endlessly caught in a blizzard sparkling with 10 real diamonds.
