10/15/2021
Here's a collection that started around 2015 with the 2 bottles in picture number one. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd be collecting Lydia Pinkham bottles 6 years later. This collection somehow morphed into 10 bottles now with an 11th coming soon! The first two bottles are relatively scarce and don't turn up much but they are not rare. As for the rest of them, they may look fairly normal but they are actually pretty rare varieties! Picture number two is three reworked molds I've found so far and the first two are the same mold showing they were reworked more than once too. Coincidentally, around this same timeframe of the mid 1880's, Lydia Pinkham also abruptly died. The family eventually took over the business but I believe these bottles show the hardships it took them to do it. I'm the first person in over 7 decades of bottle collecting to notice this evidence or put these facts together too! There's no other reason for reusing molds like this unless they only had a small amount of them when she died. It was just 3 years after she opened so I can easily believe she still didn't have many molds yet. This forced them to rework the ones they had until they made enough profit to get more.
The next picture is a rare machine made plate mold they used for a short time. I believe this was due to the FDA changing the rules on what words could be used in the name and embossing. It's my belief they used this plate mold to save money and simplify making the changes that came every year or two and sometimes just at random. This was all done on purpose to cost money and put smaller places out of business as they slowly detoxed the public. By the looks of it the word "purifier" was the first to be banned which changed the name of this to blood medicine. A year or so later the word "blood" was next to get the boot changing the name to simply Lydia Pinkham's medicine. This happened very fast because these plate molds are some of the hardest of all to find even though they are machine made. I have found only one vegetable compound made on this plate mold and I'm still looking for one with just medicine on it. I'm not sure if this variety even exists in the plate mold though to be honest. It depends on how fast all this changed and how long they used the plate molds which is unknown. Judging by how little they seem to turn up it doesn't look like they used them longer than a year or two at the most. I can now say something that nobody else could without getting laughed at or ridiculed:" I have a rare and valuable collection of Lydia Pinkham bottles!" Believe me, nobody is more surprised than me because I don't even have a display big enough for them. This shows how important it is to pay attention to the small details and how big a difference they can sometimes make. It also shows you how much these common bottles have been ignored for decades and shrugged off as being all the same or mass produced junk. I have proved this before with bromo-seltzer bottles and now once again with Lydia Pinkham bottles! You can't get more common yet I've made collections that are both interesting and eye catching with both! My knowledge will hopefully open some eyes to these common bottles and help make them more collectable. I just figured out some lost history, try doing that with your rare or very old bottle! You'll learn that we know much more about everything made before 1900 than we do after! It makes no sense but it's true because this is not my first discovery. I have saved a few pages of our history and rewrote a few things too now in my 40 years yet it's been mostly post 1880's history. One of my best finds was a bromo-seltzer bottle that was machine made around 1907-08. It is bottle number BB001 of an unknown prototype that now sits in the Bromo-Seltzer museum in Baltimore with my name on it forever for finding it! All because of small details that most people would have overlooked or shrugged off. I have donated 19 rare bottles to 3 museums so far for nothing except the credit of finding them. My lifetime of dedication and effort always being remembered is better than anything they were worth! The only thing better would be starting my own museum which could still happen when I retire hopefully around 2032ish.. I'll be posting new pictures here soon to update my records on a few collections that have grown since my last post here. This profile is where I'm keeping records including pictures and a summary of what I know, need to remember, or think so far. If that bores you,Jim Oldt may not be the right place which is easily fixed by tapping "unfollow"!
