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treasurekidd

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Hello, I'm hoping for a little help from someone a bit more knowledgeable than I am on flasks. I picked up an aqua, quart sized strap sided flask at a thrift store today. Now, the label is certainly a repro, perhaps someone's arts and crafts project or something, but can anyone give me a ballpark on the ago? The glass is very crudy and wavy, the seam stops about 3/8" below the lip, and the base has a circle in the middle, with a deep than normal, smooth impression near the bottom of the circular mark, much deeper than I've seen on similar flasks, though very hard to capture in a pic.

Thanks in advance for any info, and sorry for the sideways pics, I hate that!
 

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sandchip

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I'm going with about 1880. It's a sparkler!
 

treasurekidd

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Thanks Sandchip, that's about what I was thinking but I'm not a flask expert. It is a nice one...I think the labels coming off lol.
 

nhpharm

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That's a purty one! I'd say it is about 5 years or so newer than that (1885ish) based on the tooled lip.
 

carling

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I don't believe the label is a repro. Label is not original to the bottle, but not a repro. Bottle was probably reused.
 

saratogadriver

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I thought I remembered the Dr. Virgil's labels as a fantasy label but a google search isn't turning anything up. it certainly has all the looks of a fairly old label.

Jim G
 

CanadianBottles

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That label is absolutely a fantasy. Apart from the lower half of the label being a bit anachronistic with the upper half (not to mention the idea of a bottle of snake venom being pretty suspect to begin with), the dead giveaway is the company it's attributed to at the very bottom - it's hard to read but I can still make out "Ye Olde Concoction Shoppe." I Googled this and found this: https://worlds-end-book.fandom.com/wiki/Snake_venom. So it seems that it was made as memorabilia for a fantasy book series. The wear to the label is probably intentional fake aging - or it was in someone's basement which got flooded.

This has opened up another mystery though - the book series that this was supposedly made for doesn't seem to actually exist. There are no mentions of it outside the site I linked that I can find. So I really have no idea what the story behind that label is, but it definitely isn't a genuine antique.

Nice flask by the way!
 

hemihampton

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I've seen people cut out old Newspaper Ads & past them on a bottle as if the Ad is a Label. LEON.
 

treasurekidd

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Thank you all. Yes, it's definitely a fantasy label, but it's odd that there's no info available anywhere except that website. Seems like it's all based on something called World's End, which is supposedly a book, but I can't find anything on it anywhere. Strange indeed. The flask is sweet though lol. It's going up on ebay, and I'll let the new owner decide if the label comes off or not
 

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