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.
