Recording the bottles:
Recording of pre-1850 bottles for the book (and, now, online) project has been going on, as time and other opportunities allow, for several years. As far as possible records always includes:
- Photographs. A picture is worth a thousand words, and photographs of all sides of each bottle, as well as the base, the mouth, and any unusual features, are taken whenever possible.
- Size. The sketch illustrates measurements taken for square, rectangular and octagonal bottles. Similar measurements are recorded for other shapes, so far as the forms allow (cylinders, ovals, figurals, etc). Details of measurements aren't generally provided on this website, although they will be in an appendix of the book.
- Manufacturing methods. The form and structure of the mouth (the 'finish'), mould and any pontil marks.
- Embossing and other markings. All transcribed by hand as accurately as possible in the first instance, although some markings, including most purely decorative marks, are difficult or impossible to subsequently transfer to type via a keyboard. Original notes are always retained at least in part for this reason. For embossed writing, line breaks on the same side of a bottle are signified by a single forward slash ( / ), and line breaks between sides by a double forwards slash ( // ). On cylindrical bottles each half of a mould equates to a 'side' of the bottle. The location of markings is recorded where it isn't simply on the sides of the bottle (e.g. shoulders, base, neck, applied seal, etc), as is the orientation (vertical, horizontal), although where illustrations make these obvious they aren't noted on the website.
- Shape. Largely self-explanatory, although sometimes needing illustration and / or the help of a glossary.
- Glass colour. Again, largely self-explanatory, although there are two confounding factors: Firstly, two bottles made in the same mould on the same day from the same batch of glass may appear to be very different shades just because more glass was used for one, resulting in thicker sides and a darker colour. Secondly, the colour continuum found in glass makes it difficult to standardise in the absence of a comprehensive glass-specific colour chart, so an element of subjectivity creeps in. For both of these reasons getting hung up on describing minute variations in colour is something I try not to do.
- Completeness. Please don't throw away your pontilled embossed sherds! 100% of a bottle is obviously ideal, but even broken pieces might be useful.
- Provenance. The place where a bottle or sherd was found is an important and informative part of its history. In many cases that information has been lost as items have repeatedly changed hands, and in cases where it hasn't been lost the finders or owners may not want to be too specific with the details. But any information is better than none, and locations to within a mile or two (or even, at a push, to within a country or two: Mauritius, India, Wales, St Helena, the US) are a lot better than nothing at all.
- Location. Not geographical location, but ownership at the time the item was recorded. Some collectors want to keep this information confidential, which means that this info will not be provided either here or in the book, unless acknowledgement is specifically requested by the owner.
Someone once asked me 'Why bother with so much info about every single bottle?'. The short answer is that it isn't for every single one. I sometimes skip some of these steps, but only when it's a type that I've already recorded a few times.
Why record any type more than once? To get some idea of the amount of variation, which can give an indication of (for example) how many different moulds were used, which may give an indication of (for example) how much demand there was for a particular bottle type, back in the day. Some types I no longer record in detail at all because I recognise them as moulds I've recorded several times already, and I'll just note the existence of yet another example.
The information I record changed in the early days of this project. Mostly, I added new information to the standard records when I realised that something I hadn't recorded previously could be useful. For example, why record three measures of shoulder height on rectangular bottles? Because three measures together, rather than just two, which was what I started with, give a better indication of the shape of the top section of the bottle, which I realised might be relevant to aspects such as dating. But there are practical limits, and it's unlikely that I'll add any more measures to the standard recording format. But never say never.
