Month: January 2026

I had to wait until the auction closed to talk about this one, mainly to see if anyone had any interest in bidding on it. Sadly no-one did, because I had high hopes of finding a good home for the dozen or so glasses that have been murdered by USPS over the years. I haven’t had the heart to throw them away, which is sad, sad, very sad. But who knows, flattened and crushed could be the next big thing in the pre-pro collecting world. You read it here first!

Death by USPS

The saddest of these broken goods were a minty Beaver Run from O’Keefe and a similarly minty Harvest Home Rye from Hayner, both valuable (and rare) glasses in any condition.

Here’s the road-kill “shot glass” that was listed by kansascrazysales for $50 (or best offer):

It’s a metal shot-glass size cup from M. Wollstein Mercantile Co. of Kansas City, MO. Here’s one from the database to show you what the non-flattened version looks like:

There are at least five variants of this cup that I’m aware of and, because they’re metal and fairly resilient compared with the glasses, they’re not uncommon. This particular version shows up for sale about once every 18 months or so, with an average sale price of $20.

The rare flattened version was, according to the seller, dug out of the ground by a metal detectorist. You have to admire the sales pitch:

“For sale is an ultra-rare, 100% authentic pre-Prohibition aluminum advertising shot glass from the famous Kansas City mail-order liquor dealer:

M. WOLLSTEIN MERCANTILE CO.
MAIL ORDER LIQUOR HOUSE
KANSAS CITY MO.

This is the real deal – circa 1905–1916, made of lightweight aluminum with crisp raised (embossed) lettering inside a shield cartouche. These were given away as premiums by big mail-order whiskey houses right before National Prohibition killed the legal liquor business.

Condition notes:
Recovered with a metal detector (dug relic).
Completely flattened / pancaked (no longer holds 3-D shape)
Lettering is sharp and readable – displays beautifully flat
Nice even silver-gray patina
No polishing or alteration – exactly as it came out of the ground
Even in this flattened state, it is still one of the scarcest Kansas City pre-Pro advertising shot glasses known“

Someone should make him an offer, really…

In case anyone is interested, 133 shot-glass auctions closed in the past 28 days. Sixty-four of these closed without a buyer (including the flat one above); average price of glasses that sold was $32.46.

Few will have missed the large collection of pre-pro glasses listed this past Summer by eBay seller visitoursite*yeoldebrew.com. The owner of the site in question is Scott Bristoll, who is located in the Cincinnati area. I’ve been visiting his site for many years and purchased a beautiful reverse-on-glass Philadelphia distillery sign from him several years ago. It remains as one of my favorite non-shot glass collectibles, along with the paperweights (see previous post). And barrel stencils. Ummm……

When a collection like this pops up on eBay, one naturally wonders who the owner is – or was. Collections are assembled and then disassembled via eBay on a regular basis, either because a collector’s interests have moved on, they need funds to address a personal crisis, or they’re being sold off as a part of an estate. So who did this one belong to? Someone we knew, perhaps?

The listing contained sufficient rare offerings that it proved relatively easy to identify them as having been purchased ten or twelve years ago by eBay bidder s1c2o3o4t5e6r7. He later changed his handle to whatchagot513, but the person behind both IDs was John Richards, familiarly known as “Scooter”.

I had a few email exchanges with Scooter re his collecting interests, but can’t say that I knew him well. He was, well, let’s say an “exuberant” collector who would bid on anything pre-pro regardless of final bid price or what he was bidding on. He would get into serious bidding wars on common glasses, even if had 4 or 5 already. For a while, he was suctioning up every pre-pro glass that listed on eBay.

I hadn’t heard from Scooter in some time, so when his glasses started showing up on eBay, I messaged Scott to see if he’d acquired the collection. Sadly, it appears that he’s handling the glasses on the behalf of Scooter’s estate…

Some of Scooter’s more interesting acquisitions are shown below.

I recently had occasion to drop by Jack Sullivan’s blog Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men! on blogspot.com and was sad to see that the latest post was Jack’s obituary. Jack died on August 16, 2025 at 90 years of age.

I first met Jack over two decades ago when I drove down to the Alexandria, VA area from Philadelphia to attend a local bottle show. The show was ridiculously tiny – ten or so tables in total (if memory serves correctly). There was only one shot glass on offer, which I bought, and then got chatting with the dealer, who turned out to be Jack Sullivan.

This was around the time when I was gathering information on whiskey brands, liquor dealers, distilleries – anything related to the pre-pro whiskey industry – with a view to building databases that could be used to research the origins of shot glasses. I’d already acquired the copyright to HSG and OASG from Barb Edmonson, Howard Currier had donated his brand database that he’d compiled using Bob Snyder’s Whiskey Brands, and I’d also purchased all of Bob’s research material, including government warehouse transaction copies that I used to form the beginnings of the distillery database. What was missing was copies of city business directories that Barb E. had used to research glasses in HSG and OASG. When I contacted her to find out what had happened to them, she thought that she’d donated them to Mark Pickvet (author of Shot Glasses: An American Tradition). When I wrote to him asking whether he still had them, he failed to respond, so the trail was dead.

To my surprise, Jack revealed that he’d bought the city directories from Barb E to support his research on whiskey dealers for the many articles that he’d published in various bottle and club magazines over the years. Even better, he was happy to donate them to the cause! Some time later, I drove back down to Alexandria to pick them up and the City database was born.

I stayed in touch with Jack over the years and frequently ran into him at local and national bottle shows. He also “nipped” (his term for copy and pasting) many shot glass photos from the website to illustrate his articles that appear in Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men! and his other blog Memories and Miscellany (originally named Bottles, Booze, and Backstories), which I was more than happy to contribute given his kind donation of the directories.

Not only was Jack a prolific writer, he had wide-ranging collecting interests. He is perhaps best known for his jug collection, which he eventually donated to a museum. In more recent years, he moved on to whiskey-related paperweights, much to my chagrin. Paperweights had been a side-interest of mine for some time, but now was regularly losing out to Jack when they showed up on eBay.

Jack will be missed, but he turned ownership of his articles and blogs over to the FOHBC so they’ll remain available to us indefinitely.