Vintage Glass Bottles
Aug 4th, 2009 by admin
For many people, vintage glass bottles are just items that take up valuable space, usually in kitchen. To others, they are spectacularly valuable and beautiful objects that are worth admiring. Only these people can appreciate the effort and craftsmanship that is needed to produce these truly beautiful things. I consider myself to be one of those people, I just can’t not to admire stylishness and beauty of vintage glass bottles. The astonishingly beautiful shapes and colors of vintage glass bottles have always fascinated me. However, there are many other reasons to collect vintage glass bottles, apart from their georgous look.
Vintage glass bottles are really a part of history. Various types of vintage bottles tell us a lot about particular period of history and the way of life at that time or about development of particular industry. For example, antique medical bottles demonstrate how far the medical industry has progressed and how much has changed. Medical items used to be stored in bottles, these days they are kept in plastic bags. Taking a look at antique glass bottle can take you decades back in history. There are many antique bottles from the pharmaceutical industry that have the name of the chemical and even poison warnings worked right into the bottle’s design.That is so different from bottles today where all the signs are printed on adhesive labels and subsequently put on the bottles that are pure and simple, with no signs on them..
You could very well say that antique bottles are a part of true American culture. Old Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola bottles can remind us of the time when they were sold in glass bottles and were enjoyed at a real soda counter. Other sorts or vintage bottles that are extremely valuable to collectors include whiskey bottles, vinegar bottles,torpedo bottles, cosmetic bottles, and especially beer bottles. Exploring vintage glass bottles is a great way to study American history and development of American culture.
One can find antique bottles all across the United States. Good places are ghost towns, old dumps, old houses, old homesteads, antique stores and the campsites on the trails that the early pioneers used to cross the United States. I recommend you to visit the National Bottle Museum before you start treasure hunting for vintage glass bottles. It’s address is 76 Milton Avenue, Ballston Spa, NY and it is a truly wonderful museum. Total heaven for everyone who is interested in vintage bottles. Staff in the museum is very well informed and helpful, they can give you lots of useful advice.
vintage glass bottles are appreciated for their various colours as well as their shapes. You just can’t see so much detail and effort put into bottles today. Bottles today are extremely simple and pure, they include no decorations or signs. They just perform their function with very few estetical value. Just imagine a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup and you will have an idea of what antique bottles looked like. The most valuable antique bottles are the ones in good, but also unusual shape. Colour is also very important determinant of value, some colours are more valuable than others. Colors with highest value are yellow and olive greens, cobalt and teal blues, yellow, purple, and green. Some old bottles can have extremely high value, they can be sold for literally tens of thousands of dollars. Therefore buying and selling vintage glass bottles can be very lucrative and profitable business. However, you can make wonderful profit just by looking for vintage bottles in your back garden or in an old house. Who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky and you’ll find some antique bottle worth thousands of dollars.
I hope I helped to fire up your passion for collecting vintage glass bottles and that you will make a start on your treasure-hunting journey. I wish you best luck with it.
I have a question and I am not sure if you can help.
I have a large collection of vintage glass bottles. they came from my husband’s mother who collected them in New Mexico. The box is huge and I haven’t even seen them all.
We are moving and have been carting this around with us for years. I just want to sell them but I do not have the time for research or eBay.
Do you have any suggestions? A collector who would buy them all? I am not interested in a huge profit but I would like them to go to someone who appreciates their value.
Thanks you very much,
Mary Adams
Dear Mary,
I have carefully read your comment and I have couple of ideas I want to share with you.
If you only want to just quickly pass your bottle collection to someone who as you say “appreciates their value” and the profit is not so important then you could donate them to the National Bottle Museum: http://www.nationalbottlemuseum.org/
If you want to make some money then I would recommend to sell the whole collection to some dealer with antique bottles, I found one here: http://www.antiquebottles.com/sell.html
It would also be a good idea to try to find a dealer in your local area, it should make the whole process quicker. Try searching for “selling antique bottles” + name of your city or state in Google.
I hope this helps. Wish you a lot of luck.