Beginner Question - Price Guide?

[indianainsulators]

Hello, this is a rookie question.
I come from the insulator world, where we have a price guide that is generally accepted as the standard. I've been recommended the Red Book for jars.
My question is, how do you determine the price of a bottle? So far, I've just been going with my gut. What do I feel comfortable paying for it. However, I can't tell a $1 bottle from a $1,000 bottle. I don't want to overpay, nor do I want to miss a good deal.
Is there a standard price guide for bottles? I haven't seen one, nor can I imagine how such a publication would be compiled, as there are so many variations of color, manufacturer, embossings, etc.
I feel like a burden constantly asking my bottle friends for their input on prices.

 

[Step Back In Time]

I usually just check eBay. I know that there are some books about specific kinds of bottles, but I'm not sure which one you would be interested in. You could look on Amazon.

 

[CanadianBottles]

This is the sort of thing that really only comes through experience. Like you say, just too many bottles out there to ever compile a guide, and the prices fluctuate wildly at auctions. A $50 bottle on Wednesday might be a $200 bottle on Friday, just depending on who happens to be looking at the time. Generally speaking, variations of manufacturer and minor variations of embossing don't affect prices that much (early versions of iconic soda bottles are an exception to this, sometimes). Bottle collectors usually aren't specialist competionists to that degree. Colour massively affects price though, typically the more aesthetically pleasing the better.

Really, we're all just going with our gut for the most part. $1000 bottles will almost always be obviously impressive, just by looking at them (ACL sodas and bottles from particularly desirable locations are an exception, occasionally). $1 bottles will be ones that have nothing impressive about them, or are one of the same fifty or so extremely common bottles which you'll quickly learn to recognize. Age plays a big part as well, older is almost always better. Some types of bottles can safely be assumed to be worth at least $20 or so regardless of what they are - for example anything pontilled and embossed, any stoneware beverage bottle from North America, any figural medicine bottle, and any druggist bottles in an unusual colour will be a pretty solid bet no matter what it is.

Geography also has a huge effect on prices. A fairly plain circa 1910 embossed druggist bottle from Philadelphia probably won't be worth much because there are countless Philadelphia druggists, but an otherwise similar bottle from Dawson City can easily be worth hundreds. Regions which were not very urbanized in 1900 but are quite urbanized now will typically have far more valuable bottles, but those bottles will not be easy to find. Sometimes the collectors are different in different places as well - for example, seltzer siphons don't seem to be particularly desired by US collectors at all, but they're prized by Canadian collectors, and it's hard to find Canadian seltzers for under $50 or so for the common ones. Why is this? I have no idea. (I mean, I understand why our collectors like them, they're beautiful bottles, but I don't understand the disinterest among US collectors).

With bottles, more so than insulators, the two big questions are 1. Does it look cool? and 2. Is it rare? The first question is easy, the second comes with experience. But it's not very common for a bottle which doesn't look cool to be worth a lot of money. And really if you're just starting out, you probably shouldn't be paying a bunch of money for bottles yet. So I'd suggest sticking with visually appealing ones which you find available for cheap.

 

[Sitcoms]

CanadianBottles, as always, hit the nail right on the head here. I'm not familiar with the insulator world, but I sell and list plenty of the bottles that I find - which are mostly from the 30s through the 60s, and have almost no established value. Some of the more popular bottles - sodas from big names (Pepsi, Coke, Mountain Dew, ETC) can be easier to price, but because few people dig or sell these bottles a lot of the time I'm taking guesses on pricing. Very few of the bottles I have are worth more than $1-$20, and the best of those are either old, have great ACL graphics, or some other notable feature. There are a few books, like Bill Porter's Coke book, that can tell you the rarity of certain bottles/manufacturers that were well known, but they will often give no price as it fluctuates wildly.

When it comes to pricing, I usually price the same way I do with other reselling items - check eBay sold items for the last 90 days to get an idea of what things are actually selling for. If you can find an exact match that's great, but often times you'll have to search vague terms in order to even get similar bottles. I sold a somewhat local germicide ACL a few weeks ago ("The Red Cross Nurse" out of Nashua, NH) that I could find no examples of - and simply had to take my best guess. Usually those end up going to auction to just wait and see what they pull (that particular bottle went for about $10).

 

[DavidW]

There are a number of bottle price guides that have been published over the last 40+ years, and I have some of them in my library. But I consider most of them to be almost useless for finding the current values of any bottles. They are mostly good for "documentation" that is, knowing that such-and-such bottle has been confirmed to exist - and so is listed in the hardcopy literature. It is interesting to thumb through them just for fun.

One well-known mass-market price guide was written by Hugh Cleveland. ("Bottle Pricing Guide"). I think it is interesting as it lists lots of more commonly found medicine and other kinds of bottles, but the prices are all over the map. Some rare bottles are priced WAY too low, others (very common) are priced WAY too high. It's long out of date anyway.

Like others have said, the best way of judging value is to look at ebay's COMPLETED LISTINGS. The down-side to that is that ebay only keeps the last 3 months (or so) listings visible on the site. For older sales listings, a search on Worthpoint (Worthopedia) is the best method, but to see the actual ending prices you have to sign up as a paying member.

There was a series of bottle price guides published by "DIGGER O'DELL" many years ago (1990s I believe) and there were about 10 volumes (maybe more?) - covering actual High end auction ending prices for a variety of different bottle categories (inks, bitters, sodas, historical flasks, black glass, medicines, whiskeys, etc). For the most part, only scarce and more unusual bottles are listed (not commonly seen types). I haven't checked lately, but I assume those books are now very hard to find - they are collectible in their own right.

I do have a suggestion for anyone trying to find the most inexpensive copies of out-of-print bottle price guides: Try searching the BOOKFINDER.COM website and type in keywords that you think might be part of a book title. The bookfinder site scans thousands of booksellers and sites and give you a very easy, fast overview of how scarce an older book is and what the going prices are for a book.