Thursday, June 25, 2009

Bill Hunt's Medicine Bottle Glass Index


This database is a reference to aid in the identification of embossed medicine bottles. It is equally appropriate for researching complete labels as well as bottle label fragments and is suitable for use by bottle collectors as well as historical archeologists. The finding aid is available as a Microsoft Word document or as a text file. The data file was built as a text file to allow the researcher to employ word processing software text finding aides (a "word search") to locate strings of letters, complete words, or combinations of words which appear on a bottle or bottle fragment. It includes about 6,080 entries.

The embossed label listing was compiled using information from 38 archeological reports and popular bottle publications. Printed labels were not used in the data file's compilation.

Image of a Decorative Bottle About this bottle

This finding aid has proven itself to be an extremely rapid means of identifying an embossed medical bottle or fragment and sources of information for that specimen. Where once it may have taken hours or days to sort through the published materials, now only minutes are required to either locate a label or establish that it is unlisted in the designated sources. The database will be updated as entry errors and additional published information are provided by users.