Pictured is Alan Blakman who specialises in selling bootle at BBR Auctions,Elsecar Heritage Centre
IT was while on a teenage date that Alan Blakeman discovered something which has been a pleasure and obsession ever since.
It was an antique bottle.
"We were walking around this lake, all romantic," says the 62-year-old. "I saw this piece of half-buried glass and, for some reason, I dug it up.
"It was a broken bottle neck with a marble in. I'd never seen anything like it but when I took it home my dad said it was an old pop bottle – the marble was to attract children. I thought it was so beautiful I immediately wanted to find an undamaged one. I was so hooked, the next day I went to the town dump with my spade."
Today, Alan has dozens of such 'codd bottles' and, as one of the world's foremost experts on glassware and pottery, has bought and sold thousands more.
His business BBR (British Bottle Review) Auctions – based in Elsecar Heritage Centre near Barnsley – is one of the UK's leading auction houses for antique bottles, pots, ink wells, clay pipes and medicine jars.
And this year Alan will cement his reputation by releasing his 12th – and far most ambitious – book on the subject: the somewhat specialist A World Encyclopedia Of Ink Wells.
Read the rest of the interview here: http://www.thestar.co.uk/community/the-diary/one_man_bottle_bank_1_4146478
He sure looks happy with his antique bottles, doesn't he?!
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