Collecting Glass Bottles

Collecting glass bottles can be a fun and profitable hobby. For example, milk bottles and soda bottles with painted labels which were made in the early 1900s were worth only a few dollars not that long ago. However, more people now want these hard to find items, driving the cost up to hundreds of dollars.

Generally speaking, the older glass bottles are worth more money. They did not start being made by machine until 1914. Bottles made before then are more rare. To tell the difference, you need to take a look at the mold seam of the bottle. The mold seam is a vertical line which is formed when the halves of the mold used to make the bottle meet.

Non-machine made bottles have mold seams that stop before running over the top of the lip. Machine made bottles have mold seams going all the way over the lip.

Even if a glass bottle is rare that does not mean it is valuable. For a glass bottle to be valuable, there must be people who are looking for that particular type of bottle. If you are just starting your hobby of collecting glass bottles, you probably don’t know what types of bottles people want. You can find out by looking at the internet, reading books, and talking with dealers and other collectors.

The closer a bottle is to its original condition, the better price you can usually get for it. When you are finding glass bottles, it is important to wrap them in newspapers or other protective material. If your glass bottles have any chips or cracks in them, their value will go down. Do everything you can to make sure the bottles you discover look good. If you have the original label, wrapper, or box for the bottle, that will increase the value.

Another thing that plays a role in determining the value of the glass bottle is color. If the bottle is aqua, amber, or clear, it probably is not going to be worth that much since those colors are pretty common. Olive green, black, teal blue, and green are slightly more rare and can fetch a better value. Yellow, cobalt, and purple are the rarest colors and as such are usually worth more money. People who will pay top dollar for a bottle want something that is beautiful and unique.

If you find a glass bottle that is embossed, chances are you can get more money from it. The embossing should identify the product, the manufacturer, a date, or geographic area. A bottle that just has the name of the product on it will not fetch as much price as one that has more details.

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