Bottles (again)

 Up at the Athenaeum, one of my colleagues brought in three glass bottles found while digging in her garden and asked me to take a look at them.

The bottles all look to be from the first half of the twentieth century, and are fairly generic examples of medicine bottles.

This first one is a fairly generic clear glass bottle of the sort used to package aspirin and similar over the counter medicines.

The second one is a little more interesting. Made from brown glass, which has become slightly crazed over the years, it has Faulding embossed on one of the narrower faces of the bottle. Faulding is a long established Australian manufacturer of over the counter remedies.

The bottle is not ribbed or dimpled suggesting it orginally contained a non prescription medicine.

The final bottle is potentially more interesting, consisting of a narrow clear glass cylinder. Close examination showed that it still had a label in white paint on the bottle, albeit faded and worn.

Playing about with the image using Microsoft photo editor brought up the words 'Nyal Cold Sore'.

Like Faulding, Nyal is a long established Australian brand of off the shelf pharmaceutical products. Experience documenting Nyal products at Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern suggests that the form of the logo used - with its distinctive lower case 'y' - means that the bottle dates to the late 1950s or early 1960s

The plan is to document them fully next week, using the folksonomy I developed for the Dow's documentation project. The items are fairly generic and we are not a collecting institution, so once documented we will offer them to a local museum - unlike many bottles, these ones most definitely have a provenance...