The (NON) Keepers

[f1addict]

I'm curiuos. I've been reading here about what makes the cut and what doesn't but I've often been surprised by what's left behind. I saw that Matt left more than he took when he left his most recent dig in Thermos ® glass hell. I'm sure it's just because you know your bottles, you know what's common, and you have a pretty good idea of what you already have 20 of back at home.

My question is, what do you do with the ones that don't make the cut? Do you leave them sitting there on the surface for someone else to find, do you indulge in human nature and throw rocks at them until they are just a pile of antique glass (knowing that they are common and of no value), or do you carefully place them back in the bottom of the pit and fill it back in?

Also, do you leave them behind because you simply don't have the room for any more common bottles or because you're really only looking for the more desirable (valuable) examples?

 

[CALDIGR2]

Sometimes, a good 50% of bottles we dig are returned to the source. We just toss 'em back in, with no particular care given to whether they survive, or not. Unembossed and common junk has no place in my garage. They are unsellable, period!

 

[tigue710]

The truth is I would take every bottle if I could. Of course I like the older, colored, heavily embossed crude stuff, (not always all at once), and that is all I have room for. Of the bottles in my keeper pic none will make the shelf, I just took the ones I know I can sell for a couple bucks in the antique store, to pay for gas money on the dig. Some that I left would sell too but I already have 30 boxes of dug bottles sitting in the driveway with a tarp over them! As a renter I have no room...

Usually ever year I do a different display of common bottles, and them I sell the set and pick a new bottle. Last year was three piece English whiskeys, this year it is bitterquilles and hock wines

The bottles I leave behind I leave out for a little while so my digging partners and I can pick through them. If it is an area people frequent I leave them out and they disappear eventually, if it is a private area I place them carefully in a hole and bury then for future diggers. I think anyone who breaks bottles isn't a true collector, a bold statement but I like each and every bottle, and hope someday someone else will think it worth to take home.

 

[Jim]

My digging buddy and I usually give away more bottles than we keep. I hate to dump any 100+ year old bottles back in the pit, so we try to give away the nice (but common) stuff. As for slickers, they usually get dumped, simply because there is usually nobody who wants a huge pile of plain, unembossed bottles even if they are old. Can't say that I would blame them [].

People are usually delighted when we give them embossed meds, cone inks and other bottles that may be common to us, but not to most people. Even if the pit totally sucks, or cannot be found or accessed, anyone who is nice enough to give us permission to dig or even look for pits gets hooked up with something decent. ~Jim

 

[Bottleman]

Any bottles we don’t want we let the home owner go through first and what they don’t want goes back in the hole. You would be surprised how excited someone can get over a box of unmarked medicines. Usually they say “Are you sure you don’t want these????†I guess they are surprised that I was going to put them back in the hole.

~~Tom

 

[Jim]

We have had a few people who saved the slickers. We had one guy who was really cool to us, and he was interested in every bottle we chose not to keep. Even the 1920s slickers from the fill, he saved 'em all. Most people will pick out the embossed stuff and tell us to pitch the slicks back in the pit.

If we dig a really good pit, the owners end up with some really nice stuff that would usually be keepers for us. I think it's only fair, because without them, we would have nothing from that pit. Unfortunately, if it's a 1900 pit with no keepers, we can't be too generous, but I always carry a few nice embossed meds with me just to show that we appreciate the permissions. ~Jim

 

[cobaltbot]

I'm with tique on this and since I dig mostly shallow dumps, lately I try to leave them mouth sloped down when I bury them so ice doesn't get in and ruin a perfectly good one penny bottle! I too hope someone will want them way in the future.

 

[lexdigger]

On a permission we always give the homeowner all of the common embossed stuff and anything else they seemed interested in. Most of the time they want anything we're not keeping except for the clear slicks. On a construction site we will rebury the commons. Alot of times if a pit is full of glass you will need 90 percent of it to go back in the hole to fill it up! We've kept a couple of hundred bottles out of a pit before and we had to find stuff to throw in it to get it filled back in. In a dump I rebury all the commons. I don't go out of my way to make sure they don't get broken, it happens, but I don't really try to smash them all either. We always joke that we're putting them back in there for the archeologists Chris

 

[f1addict]

Great to hear from all of you on this. I fall into the category of Tigue and Cobalt, perhaps it's because my girlfriend and I are new to the hobby and have yet to fill our respective garages with 18th century pontils. Every bottle we find is a treasure and if it's whole or at least close, we'll bring it home with us. We study the base or embossing and try to find identifying markings then research it. Even if there's a million of them out there, it's neat to know that I've got one of them. We haven't the reference library that some of you do, and mostly rely on the internet and you folks for our information.

On the other hand, I know what you're saying about an abundance of common bottles. The dump we've been working on for the past year has this one jar, about 3 inches tall by about 2 inches in diameter. They are everywhere and virtually all are unbroken. I would guess that there are two to three HUNDRED of these pesky little jars in there. I once threw one at a large granite rock and it just bounced off the rock into the meadow. I could see a mark it left on the boulder but when I retreived the jar, there wasn't a blemish to be found. Other than those silly little jars, we keep everything else we find and other than the one time, I've never broken (or attempted to break) an old bottle or jar. The way I look at it is when we're done picking through this place another someone may come through there and find great value in those jars or anything else we leave behind, I see no need to destroy any of it and take as much care to avoid damaging the things we'll leave as we do the things we take.

 

[tigue710]

Oh yes, the jars... they come in different sizes too, soon you will meet the faithful catchup bottle, which also for some reason never breaks! Those I am not to careful with, but I dont go out of the way to break any of them, and I try not to break the ones that some else might like!