Collecting Old Bottles

Most of us collect glassware in patterns, dinnerware, stemware and blown glass, but there’s a "whole nother world" out there so to speak, that can be interesting historically, fun to pursue and quite lucrative if you’re into buying and selling of antiques.

Collecting old bottles is something not many people do think about, but its quite a fascinating study in the history and evolution of glassware. It can entail purchasing from collectors or antique dealers, or something as simple as a walk in the woods.

MY own fascination with antique bottles and jars came about quite by accident, while taking a walk one day through the back woods of a very rural Pennsylvania community near Titusville Pennsylvania. Near our home, quite by accident we came across an old graveyard that was nearly buried in underbrush and overgrown with trees, and near it, a home that had been abandoned for what looked then like eons.

Lying in a heap on the ground were literally hundreds of bottles, jars, some half buried in silt and mud, others above the ground. Being somewhat less than prissy when it comes to something making me curious, I of course had to take a closer look at all the brightly colored glass on the ground. This was well before I collected anything at all in point of fact.

Scattered on the ground were glass bottles labeled bitters, different spirits, old milk bottles and so on. This was of course, probably in the mid seventies and well before we thought that recycling was the way to go.

I picked up a few  bottles and took them home,  along with a couple of glass and a sort of ceramic looking  insulators  which had,  I assumed  come from the telephone and power lines above my head and began to do a bit of digging into their history. Some were from a local company, a dairy,  who told me that bottle had been used more than thirty years in the past. . Others had dates fortunately and were dated some forty or fifty years past. It was a veritable treasure trove of history from my area of Pennsylvania. 

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Glass bottle collecting is a walk through history, and can offer you a glance at how we’ve evolved, the types of glassware we’ve used and how thngs have changed just in the past fifty years. It’s an amazing hobby that has given me a lot of enjoyment, and a taste for those brightly colored bits of glass that you can only find containing things like spirits, medications and creams.

Wine bottles, medication bottles and jars, spirits and creams, the array of older bottles and jars out there is endless and the colors and types of glass are just amazing. It’s a hobby that doesn’t require a vast outlay unless you want it to, you can find many of these older bottles at yard sales, on ebay or at a church rummage sale, so you’re probably, unless you get into it fairly deeply, not going to expend a vast sum of money in the beginning, but will have something unique with each purchase.

For those of you who might be interested, there are several great books out there to help you to get started, and Ebay of course, to get your collection in motion.

There are several definitive books on the collection of old bottles and jars to get you started , among them:

Antique Glass Bottles: Their History and Evolution (1500-1850) by Willy Van den Bossche, Email: wvdbossche@planet.nl This is an incredibly comprehensive guide to all sorts of bottle collecting, but particularly the European ones. The photos are crisp and clear, the text is easy to read and its a great desk reference for you. No matter what you collect this will help, but particularly if y ou’re a bottle collector or simply want to know a bit more about historical glassware.

American Stoneware Bottles is the only publication dealing with the  early hand made American stoneware bottles. There are about 107 pages containing information on over 1,500 stoneware bottles, with many being identified as to location and date. Illustrated with numerous color, black&white, and line drawings of these early pottery items   $24.95 with shipping of $2 per book.

Kovels’ Bottles Price List by Ralph and Terry Kovel.
The 13th edition.
Excellent guide for someone who is relatively new and wants to see and get prices for the more common types of bottles.

Collecting antique bottles and jars is not for everyone, certainly not for those who don’t want to put any real research into those collectibles, but you’re a digger, like I am, and want to spend a bit of time actively working with your hobby, this one will keep you quite satisfied.