Sad to See It Go

This bottle washed up on a Cape Cod beach at Humarock when I was a kid and we were visiting friends; I think I was about 7 at the time. No idea what it originally held — whiskey, at a guess — but I think it has some age to it, as it’s meant to be corked, not screwed shut with a cap. I suspect it held a good grade of whiskey, as the stippling molded into it is not something a distiller would have bothered with for a cheap bottle.

When my folks bought a cottage on the Cape a couple of years later, they allowed me to do a little bit of the decorating. I found molded glass bottles that were sold as if they were crystal decanters here and there, and I filled them with colored water before perching them on the living room windowsill. But I never filled this one with anything, because I thought it looked fine just as it was.

I’m not a bottle collector, myself. I hope that the buyer of this bottle appreciates it as the small work of industrial art that it is. It’s little touches like this, ornamentation on a simple item that today we would not even think about adding to the design, that make pieces of that era into things of beauty.