Where are all the embossed ABM druggist bottles?

CanadianBottles · Jun 14, 2014

This is something I've been wondering for a while. Why aren't there any embossed ABM druggist bottles? Or if there are, I've never seen one. I mean, what was going on in the period between the tooled lip druggists and the ACL druggists? Did everyone just use unembossed bottles? And if so, why? Or did the druggist bottle producers just continue making bottles by hand for a really long after most other bottles had switched over? I know that they continued on into the twenties, but the thirties? That seems like a stretch.Does anyone have an embossed ABM druggist from North America? It seems like there should have been at least one produced somewhere. CanadianBottles

CanadianBottles · Jun 14, 2014

Owl Drug Store bottles! I just answered my own question. Can anyone think of any others? But the question still remains, why so few?

MichaelFla · Jun 14, 2014

I know there was a drug store in my home town that was in business from 1924 until 1933 and all of their bottles are BIM. While I have seen a couple cork top ABM pharmacy bottles, they are few and far between. Mostly the ABM ones I have seen were screw top.

mctaggart67 · Jun 14, 2014

This is an interesting question, and one I've asked myself before. To my mind, the most plausible theory is that ABMs without embossing were so cheap to produce, relative to the cost of hand-blown embossed prescription bottles, that they "won" out for reasons of cost. True, there was a period in the late 1910s to the mid-1920s, in Canada at least, in which the production of BIMs and ABMs overlapped. In fact, I've got documentary evidence of this in a period Richards Glass Co. (RIGO) catalogue I have. This overlap period shows that many druggists still clung to older ways, but by the mid-1920s, Canada's two major producers of prescription ware, Dominion Glass and Consumers Glass, were no longer producing BIMs. I also surmise that the glass companies found it more practical and economically feasible to not produce custom-embossed ABM prescription bottles because the runs for each drugstore were too small for machine production. The only embossed ABM Canadian prescription bottles I can think of are those screw-toppers made from the late 1920s through to, probably, the 1940s or even 1950s for the Tamblyn drugstore chain. Now, Tamblyn's was such a large business that the company could afford to buy custom-embossed bottles and buy enough of them to make production worthwhile from a glass factory perspective.

bobble · Jun 14, 2014

[attachment=0E6036B941214A64A6BCCEFCFC84AAC3.jpg]Here is me favorite,applied top,3 part mold. I X L embossed on the bottom. I've had it on here be fore,couldn't resist.

bobble · Jun 14, 2014

[attachment=604D305F288A408EB2ACBAF94CD66909.jpg]OOPS. Here's the bottom. Happy Fathers day boys!

CanadianBottles · Jun 14, 2014

Thanks Mctaggart, that makes sense about it being too small an order to justify the cost of production. They still made small runs of milks, but I suppose they weren't producing nearly as many milks anyway, and milks were way more expensive. I always imagined it just being a matter of switching out the molds and pressing ON, but as I have no idea how a bottle machine works it's probably a lot more complicated than that.

mctaggart67 · Jun 15, 2014

From what I've read about early Owens' machines, production rates varied from 200 to 700 bottles per hour and that production costs were anywhere from one-tenth to one-twentieth cheaper per gross than BIM production. I can well imagine that running the machines as long as possible without interruption was the way to go. Moreover, cheaply mass-producing a standard size of unembossed prescription bottle to the tune of thousands per day would have made good business sense. Not only would the per unit cost be invitingly low, production could take place when machine time was open and in anticipation of orders which were sure to arrive for such cheap bottles. To boot, the glass company would not have been stuck with customized bottles only salable to one specific drugstore because standard bottles could be temporarily warehoused for eventual distribution to any and all pharmacy customers as their orders arrived.

cowseatmaize · Jun 15, 2014

Couldn't agree more. Before ABM if the store wanted to pay and have molds made the glassworks were happy to make the bottles. After, not so much to have a dozen made for one size. Down here it was Rexall but if you notice they aren't seen with a city, state etc.. At least not that I've noticed.Bob, that's a nicely deformed bottle but not really on subject of machine made druggists.

Plumbata · Jun 15, 2014

There are no embossed ABM druggists from Peoria that I'm aware of, but the latest BIMs I am aware of came from the Best and Jordan pharmacy which operated between 1921 and 1937. In Bloomington, IL, the Biasi drug store, which opened in 1922, used BIMs as well as embossed ABMs:

Where are all the embossed ABM druggist bottles?

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