New To Me Liniment

[Semar]

I bought this bottle on Etsy because I liked the crude lettering, and shape; plus, it probably worked unlike most medicines of its day. Arnica can sooth bruises and reduce inflammation. Really, it just was charmingly funky. Five and three eighths tall by roughly 2 and a half inches wide and one inch thick. the glass has a light green tint. Please excuse the color shift, it's
caused by my sunlight box.
I figure this bottle is probably pre civil war, there is no pontil on its bottom.
Whatta ya think?

 

[hemihampton]

I have the exact same bottle but can't remember which privy I dug it from? Leon.

 

[Semar]

I have the exact same bottle but can't remember which privy I dug it from? Leon.

I've seen a few on ebay/etsy. The lettering is way funky; not particularly the Arnica Liniment side, but the sides of the bottle with the proprietor's name and new york make it kinda charming.

 

[CanadianBottles]

That's a great looking bottle! I doesn't really look pre-civil war to me though. Does it have a tooled lip? That would make me think it was more around the 1870s-80s or so. What does the base look like?

Sometimes cheaply-made bottles ended up looking much older than they actually were. I found this one a few years ago, it's got incredibly crude embossing and an applied lip (maybe even a rolled lip?) that only made it around 3/4 of the mouth, but it came from a 1910s-20s hotel dump so I doubt it was a late throw.

 

[Semar]

That one's a hoot!
Whoever made the lettering must have had dyslexia. The bottle doesn't look like a salad dressing bottle; maybe it was a dressing for shoes or some other product. Hard to tell about an applied lip although there is an uneven line inside the neck close to the opening of the bottle

 

[CanadianBottles]

That one's a hoot!
Whoever made the lettering must have had dyslexia. The bottle doesn't look like a salad dressing bottle; maybe it was a dressing for shoes or some other product. Hard to tell about an applied lip although there is an uneven line inside the neck close to the opening of the bottle

Yeah it definitely looks like someone's first attempt at mold cutting, doesn't it? They clearly hadn't figured out how to write letters in reverse yet, or how to plan the embossing out so that all the letters fit. You're right on it being a shoe dressing, Packard was a big shoe company in Montreal in the early 20th century.

And that sounds to me like a tooled lip, tooled lips can have lines inside the neck but applied lips need to have a line on the outside. And the seam on an applied lip should go all the way to the base of the lip.