Findlay Bottle Show

Great Antiques Bottles Info on Collectors Weekly

Collector's Weekly, the informative reference and ebay listings-tracker site has a super BOTTLES section, with articles and resource links, and best of all, it's a one-stop place to see the MOST WATCHED bottles on ebay, so you don't miss any. They also give you the recent CLOSED prices. All on one page, w/thumbnail pix, and links to the items. It will save you hours of ebay surfing. And it's FREE! Here's the link CW BOTTLES Overview . It's a great site. Be sure to bookmark it, and check out all of their bottle collecting categories - milks, jars, bitters, and so many more.

I went to the Springfield Extravaganza Antique Show yesterday, and picked up 3 scarce Ohio milks. Yay!

Left to right -- Koop Sunnydale Farms / Lima sq. pyro qt. -- Ransbottom & Son / Rockford Ohio TREQ -- Springer's Dairy Lima 1/2pt emb.

The Sunnydale Lima bottle, while scarce, is a dupe for me. The Springer's I have in a qt., so it's nice to add the 1/2 pt. to my collection. Although this one is a little hazy, it'll have to do for now.

The center one is the most interesting one of the bunch. Rockford is a small town, kind of in my area. I haven't seen a Rockford milk bottle, so it's a 1st for me. I checked in at the antique show with milk bottle experts Larry Johnson and Joe Clevenger, and they were excited to see this bottle because it's not known at all in this variation.

The unusualness is in the neck/grip embossing, which looks like bricks. It's called a brick neck, or more properly, a "Dripless".

In researching the bottle online, I found this great milk bottle info website, Doug & Linda's Dairy Antiques. They even have a page all about milk bottle necks -- http://dairyantiques.com/Milk_Bottle_Necks___Lips.html -- and say:

"One neck embossing that was patented was the Dripless milk bottle, which is pictured above. Due to the wide lip on a milk bottle they were prone to drips running down the side of the bottle. On October 3, 1933, Carl Swanson of Minneapolis, Minnesota patented a design for an antidrip milk bottle. His bottle had a series of indents around the neck, similar to a honeycomb. The idea was that this would stop the drip from moving downwards and increase the surface area so it would dry. Unfortunately this design was hard to clean, weakened the glass in the neck area of the milk bottle and was difficult to remove from the mold during manufacture.

Swanson was granted a second patent on August 27, 1935 that addressed these issues. This bottle had a pattern of embossing on the neck that looked like brickwork. The lines, however, were above the surface of the glass so the neck was not weakened. This design was easier to clean and also inhibited the downward movement of drips. The horizontal lines tended to spread out the drip letting it dry faster.

These bottles are embossed patented but have no patent date or number.

Under the brickwork pattern they were embossed DRIPLESS in a V shape. We have seen these bottles embossed or pyroglazed and in sizes of half pint, pint and quart. Many, if not all, of these milk bottles were made by The Lamb Glass Company of Mount Vernon, Ohio and the bottles will have their L52 mark. A 1936 advertisement from The Lamb Glass Company stated that these Dripless milk bottles were produced exclusively by them."