As the many years have gone by in digging, auctioning and just plain dealing in antique glass, I am amazed at how much people don’t know when it comes to handling glass in a way that will cause more enjoyment of the hobby and less time bemoaning the kind of action that resulted in a broken bottle. What we are talking about here is almost anything made out of glass, from target balls to Mason Jars, if it is made of glass it’s breakable and should be handled in a way that will never leave you crying over a broken shard.
Did you know even when you have insurance on a bottle, there are incidents in which the bottle will not be covered even if it’s accidently broken. Why would an insurance company refuse to cover a loss? Well take change of temperature for example. You have a bottle in your kitchen, you just found it and if you have the right insurance it should be covered the minute it comes into your house. It’s not real dirty but could use a cleaning so you put the bottle under room temperature water, that’s very important, and take a sponge and dish soap and clean it best you can. Use a bottle brush if need be. When cleaning antique glass in a sink you have to use room temperature water, imagine glass looking like a piece of swiss cheese under a microscope and with plenty of air holes in the glass. This allows the glass to heat up and cool down, gradually. The operative word here is gradually as glass can sit in a living room window and get very hot, it's fine after dark as long as it has a gradual cooldown. When you speed up the process of going from very hot to cool is when things can get dicey.
I washed a Teakettle Whiskey once, in hot water, it cleaned up nicely and then I put it on my mantle in my living room. I sat it next to a hot fluorescent fixture and after a few minutes heard a pop. That is that God awful sound glass makes when it breaks. In that case it went from hot water to an even hotter spot with the heat from the older light causing the glass to burst. Or even more likely is that after a hot bath and sitting next to a warm bulb, it caught a slight waft of cool air from the vent and pop! There was an 8-inch crack running from the top of the bottle to the bottom. Lesson learned.
Even more frustrating is when you send a bottle through the mail on a hot summer day. You wrap everything right, it’s ready for a trip across the country and when it arrives at its destination, the new owner opens the box and pulls it out to admire it standing next to a cool 67-degree air conditioning vent. This bottle just went from a possible 140-degree UPS truck to an air-conditioned living room, a good recipe for disaster. A lot of collectors I know don’t even open a newly arrived bottle for a day or so. Especially in the Winter and Summer. If you do this, you’ll never have to worry about a bottle just brought in can be the victim of a temperature change.
Just think about the varying temperatures a bottle can go through on a simple 3-day trek across the country. I onetime sent a very expensive bottle across country, it was in December, so it wasn’t that cold in Sacramento, but freezing everywhere else. As the bottle went from here to there, the temperature changes were I’m sure many. When it arrived in the east coast a tiny potstone that had gone barely noticed turned into an 8-inch crack that stretched even longer as even more temperature changes occurred. I was to quickly find out that my insurance wouldn’t pay for the damage, change of temperature is not covered in the policy.
It's hard to believe that a bottle that sits in a window in Austin, Texas and feels like a hot iron when you pick it up cam withstand that heat, but it does. As long as it cools down slowly. I remember hiring a photographer to do a cover years ago. He used hot lights; they are used when you want to see what the final image will look like instead of a flash. We have LCD now so heat from lights is no longer a problem. Anyway, he set everything up, we did the shot and when I went to put the bottles back in the boxes, I thought I was going to have a third degree burn on my hand. It was hot! I finally put them back in the boxes and did so very carefully. Things cooled down slowly and turned out fine, but I never did that again. Just the idea that I put a $20,000 bottle under such intense heat made me shutter.
Aside from temperature changes and glass breaking from extreme temperatures period, there are many other things collectors do that should maybe have a second look. Do you live in an area with a lot of earthquakes or tremors? Hurricanes or tornadoes? Are your bottles protected from simple things like children? I’ve had more than one child grab anything available at right around two and half feet up. Are your bottles safely stored or displayed, in other words does the whole neighborhood know you have a half-million dollars’ worth of bottles or are they behind a solid security system and double bolt doors? Are they insured? I hear collectors tell me all the time they don’t have their collection insured and I cringe. You’d be surprised how inexpensive a collection is to insure and for the price of one bottle you have the piece of mind knowing that if a bottle breaks for any reason it’s covered. Do you really want to take a chance that never in your life, will there ever be anyone looking at your bottles, including you, who doesn’t drop one? Sit one down on a table and have a cat knock it over? Never?
I admit that I probably don’t have as much protection for my bottles as I should, but I am careful. I am insured and I make sure that anyone who touches my bottles know how to handle them. That’s another very important thing that collectors need to know, how to simply handle a bottle the safest way possible.
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