apothecary/drugstore little bottle

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antares

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Greetings from Italy.
I have recently bought a great collection of 200 old ( 1880/1930) drugstore/apothecary little/medium bottles.
A lot of them are still sealed with labels, contents and wax/cork stopper.
The one i'd like to show you is, at least for me, interesting because the apothecary store on the label was active only between 1872 and 1897. I'd like to know if the glass bottle is compatible with this date or if the label has been recycled on a more recent bottle.
I hope u can appreciate the mold marks on the photo.
Best regards and thx in advance for your help.
Do you know if there is any work written in UK to help id. and date european bottles?
Paolo Marenzi
 

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andy volkerts

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The bottle looks good for 1870s or 1880s, its crude enough for maybe even early 1870s, so I think you are good to go, looks authentic to me......Andy
 

andy volkerts

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Don't know of any works on Italian or European bottles, but I am sure there would be some, Alan Austin of British Bottle Review magazine would be the only person who I would know that may be able to help. Just google BBR and his web addy should come up, also we have dug lots of bitters bottles that were made by the Carlo Erbano Milano drug co of Italy here in California, they are so common nobody much collects them, there is one guy who has a four color run of them, but that was forty years ago, and I have lost track of him. Some of the bottles with the ground stoppers are very good, and are probably the most valuable, anything that held Morphine, Cannabis, Cocaine, or Heroin are good for some bucks on e-bay........Andy
 

botlguy

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Paolo. Welcome to the forums. You show us some very interesting items and having purchased several similar collections here in the States yours looks completely legitimate to me. Congratulations.
Jim
 

antares

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Thx a lot both of you. I suppose, Andy, i spoke about Carlo Erba bottles because the name was embossed on the glass. However, if you know a valid book on dating drugstore/apothecary bottles i would buy it (better if it's an e-book).
Thx to botlguy too, i'll post another interesting bottle now.
What a pity that here in Italy, due to the strict legislation, this hobby is impossible!
Paolo
 
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Tony AZ

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Just a suggestion-should use gloves when handling old bottles esp when some are marked poison....
 

CanadianBottles

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Thx a lot both of you. I suppose, Andy, i spoke about Carlo Erba bottles because the name was embossed on the glass. However, if you know a valid book on dating drugstore/apothecary bottles i would buy it (better if it's an e-book).
Thx to botlguy too, i'll post another interesting bottle now.
What a pity that here in Italy, due to the strict legislation, this hobby is impossible!
Paolo

Unfortunately dating bottles is completely different in each country because the bottle-making techniques varied quite a lot around the world. So any information you're looking for would need to be specific to Italy, and I don't know if there are a lot of bottle collectors in Italy. Your collection looks like it mostly dates to around the turn of the century up to maybe around the 1930's or so, although those bottles with the blue caps look like the sort of thing we'd see here in the 60's so I'm not sure how old those are. The only guaranteed way to date bottles of that age is to research the individual pharmacy to determine what its most recent possible date is.

As for the strict legislation, are you sure it's that strict? Because I'd be really quite surprised if anyone would care about you digging around in turn-of-the-century dumps in Italy, of all places. That's barely even considered history over there. Here we have legislation that if interpreted literally might make bottle digging illegal, but no one cares about these dumps because they usually aren't of any historical relevance, so you aren't going to get prosecuted for it as long as you have permission from the property owner. The turn of the century was almost as well documented as our current age, so the only use archaeologists have for dumps from that era is for teaching students how to conduct a dig without risking damaging a real archaeological site.
 

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