We have big plans for e-yaji.com. We have received many comments that it is the best/easiest to use/visionary (oh, ok, no-one ever actually said that, but we read between the lines) website in the snuff-bottle world, so we have decided to improve it beyond recognition. From now on it will be abuzz with new ideas, new content, useful information, feedback options, and stuff that only Nick Moss understands. We will also include a complete list of all known songs about snuff bottles with free downloads.

A new system for selling snuff bottles at auction.

We believe that in a mature, rising market the best interests of the collector are served by selling on the open market through auction, and we offer a service acting on behalf of collectors to achieve the best results by working closely with major auction houses worldwide.

Apart from the Bloch sales 1-5 working with Bonham’s, Hong Kong, we worked with Christie’s, Hong Kong and New York, on the J & J series of auctions (ongoing), and worked with Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, for Bloch sales, 6 – 10. We also worked on the Reif (October 18, 1993), Blanche B. Exstein (21 March 2002) and the Schonfeld (21 March 2013) collections at Christie’s, New York, and with the Robert and Molly Hsieh collection at Sotheby’s, New York (March 23, 2004).

If you are interested in disposing of your collection in a cost-effective way, taking advantage of our snuff-bottle expertise, contact us and we’ll be happy to give you more details of the logistics, options, and costs.

Educational information.

Here the sky is the limit – well, actually, our capacity to input information is the limit, but we’re working on that. Here are just some of the ideas:

We will have a section for exhibitions, which, once up, will remain permanently. This will include education exhibitions curated by collectors or anyone else who is interested and by ourselves, including exhibitions of individual collections (although we reserve the right to edit or decline such exhibitions). One such exhibition which intrigues me at present is one of my ideal collection, if I had access to infinite funds and could select any known snuff bottle. This may be conflated with an exhibition of the entire history of the snuff-bottle arts. Bear in mind that with the web, one can continually add to and edit content, making it a far more flexible medium than print.

We will also provide a platform for collectors who want to publish their collections, or other related books on snuff bottles (written by themselves or others) but would rather not go to the expensive (and often tiresome) option of printing and distributing individual books.

We will try to make much of this content inter-active to allow feedback, so that we can continually add to and improve the information available.

Part of our plan is to gradually employ academics to help us with existing content and provide additional content (funded by the new auction set up, in theory), so hopefully we can make a good deal of the content bi-lingual and provide translation and research facilities to anyone who is interested. We envisage the possibility of undertaking for other dealers or collectors the cataloguing of exhibitions on a commercial basis.

We will scan in old, difficult to find publications on snuff bottles so that they are accessible to all, and, eventually, perhaps even aspire to having all known works (of merit) on the subject included, but I shall be long-dead by then!
A snuff-bottle bibliography will be posted, which we will add to as new books appear. We will also try to provide useful listings: dating systems with charts, lists of artists, research encyclopaedia, etc.

We will also have links to other useful sites.
One of the great advantages of the web is that it is always a work in progress, so we are not bound by the need to get everything right before we publish, as we would be in the world of print.

We will constantly be open to new suggestions for improving the site, and will provide a feedback option for comments on the site, its construction, and uses.
So, log on regularly – we will.