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July 2011 THE NATIONAL BUTTon BULLETIN 151

The Snouffer china buttons
booklet has been revised

The Michigan Button Society will be selling an updated reprint of The Marie
Snouffer China Buttons at the NBS Convention in Grand Rapids. Twenty years ago,
button collectors Marie and Robert Snouffer of Michigan acquired an amazing
garage sale find, a small box of over 300 unlisted china buttons for $20. The
Michigan Button Bulletin documented that discovery in 1992, including a black-
and-white image of 96 different buttons. Marie and Bob began selling what they
considered to be duplicates. Many of the collectors were from Michigan, but a sub-
stantial number of buttons were sold or given to out-of-state collectors and deal-
ers. Then Marie realized she had not included in the image all the examples. She
mounted 109 different buttons that she still possessed. In all, 190-200 Snouffer
chinas had been dispersed to other collectors.
Color images and her 109 descriptions were documented in the Spring 1999
issue of the Michigan bulletin: "Marie Snouffer's Mystery Buttons." In 2003, an
expansion of that story was printed in a booklet, The Marie Snouffer China
Buttons by the same authors, Lillian Buirkle and Marjorie Fraser. The Michigan
Button Society Color Fund sponsored the booklet, financed in part by Marie
selling her card of 109 numbered buttons and donating the money to the fund.
Although in poor health, and now a widow, Marie was pleased to see her story
documented for wider circulation.
Marie's desire to have her discovery acknowledged by the National Button
Society came to pass posthumously. In the National Button Bulletin, May 2007,
Barbara Barrans and Pat Fields of the Classification Committee submitted "A Pro-
posed Change to the NBS Classification System of China Buttons." They showed
images of many of Marie's buttons along with other uncatalogued and catalogued
chinas as examples. Included in the article was the statement, 'Snouffer. .... buttons
such as these would be appropriate in the revised china classification.' That August
the NBS membership voted to adopt the revision as presented.
The Second Edition includes revised descriptions of the 109 Snouffer buttons,
resulting from a detailed examination of the original card of 109 buttons by a
group of china button experts and its current owner, Joy LeCount. Also included
is the 110th of the undocumented buttons that Marie inadvertently sold after
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