New and Shotworthy

For those of you not yet acquainted with Glassworks auctions, you may want to bookmark their webpage because they occasionally have pre-pro shots nestled amongst their collections of bottles, jugs, and other pre-pro memorabilia. Their latest ‘End of Winter’ Potpourri Auction #129 features two lots of interest – #228 and #229. Both include 7 different bitters glasses, both with an opening bid of $120.

Lot #228 includes 6 pre-pro stemmed bitters glasses and a pebble-green beaded label glass of indeterminate origin. All of these glasses are familiar from eBay, although some are more common than others. A solid bitters starter group nonetheless.

Lot #229 should set the blood thrumming in any dyed-in-the-wool pre-pro collector’s veins. The Dr P. at top left is a Truog glass. The Alter Bismark is a pre-pro classic picture glass – this alone is worth the opening bid. The others are just gravy.

Note, however, that Glassworks auctions charges a 20% bidder premium that have to be factored into the final bid price. Their shipping prices tend to be premium also.

If you only need only one of these glasses, no fear, there’s a good chance the two lots will be picked up by resellers, broken up, and end up as buy-it-nows on eBay (e.g., follow seller id “diggerdaveb“).

eBay regulars will have found it hard to miss the one-of-a kind collection of pre-pro shots offered for sale by birdstreetantiques (a few relists are still available as I write). Most small collections are motley affairs, being composed of several of the usual Hayner variants, Sunny Brooks, Detricks, and the ever popular embossed Calverts (common, but not pre-pro).

Not so the birdstreetantiques offering. The seller is representing a family of an elderly lady from Barbara Edmonson’s old hunting grounds in CA. The collector in question has an exceptional eye for the rare and valuable, with several examples of glasses that have not been documented before, either in published sources or in the databases here at pre-pro.com. These included three lugs — one unknown — which had the Poobah salivating like a rabid mutt watching steaks cook on a grill.

Perhaps the most important of these was an “Old Homestead“, from Samuel Westheimer of St. Joseph, MO. Not only is this an older glass (pre-1900), it was clearly the work of George Truog of the Maryland Glass Etching Works fame.

Not surprisingly, the glass attracted numerous bids, eventually falling to id b***w for $305. Congratulations to the winner!

oldwhiskey

Once upon a time, many, many, moons ago, I wrote a periodic feature called Shot of The Week. For various reasons (mainly to do with time), I stopped adding to the SOTW archives back in 2014.

Much has happened within the pre-pro collecting community since that time. Many collectors cashed in their collections and dropped off eBay. Other sold off their collections, then rebuilt them, then sold them off again, and are yet again rebuilding. Several prominent collectors died, including Bob Mraz, Roger Roy, and Ralph Van Brocklin, all of whom left gaping holes in the community.

The pre-pro collecting world continues to spin on its axis, however, and many new collectors feature regularly in eBay bidding wars. Since eBay reduces bidder identities to a series of forgettable letters and asterisks, it’s difficult to follow or report on the action in any meaning way. l***c really does not have quite the same caché as does bluroc, once a familiar name on eBay.

eBay continues to showcase a seemingly never-ending bounty of old and rare pre-pro glass however, and there is still a place for a forum such as this to showcase it. I have not used blogging software before so it will take some time to get New and Shotworthy fully functional (we need a way for readers to upload images, for example), but here’s a new beginning.

For those of you interested in such things, 306 pre-pro glasses appeared for auction on eBay over the past month. 160 of those went unsold; the average price of glasses that did sell was $45.06.

oldwhiskey
(s***s on eBay)