QUEER TRADE

Evening Star, Issue 20958, 24 November 1931, Page 13

QUEER TRADE

FORTUNES IN BOTTLES CALLING WITH A FUTURE VALUE AS CURIOS. “Bottle-ohs ” are the greatest collectors ami reliquaries of all time. They pursue their treasure even to the garbage tip. An attribute of unconscious piety may' possibly be attached to a calling which provides the means wherewith new wine may bo disguised in old bottles (says a writer in the Melbourne ‘Argus'). Then bottles in all ages must be of inestimable service to mankind—the containers and transmitters of truth I The genuine “ bottle-ho ” is born first and “made” afterwards—if Ivo has a sufficient measure of the collector’s enthusiasm. I met a young man in the west on the rush to the goldfields. He had a strange obsession. His thoughts forever ran into empty bottles. Ho was the son of a marine store dealer. Bottles were in his blood. When all the talk along the track and around the camp fire was of gold he just dreamed of piles of bottles. As the party walked and talked of nuggets his eyes Scoured the plain incessantly, and in a burst of confidence he said; “ I don’t know about nuggets, but in the last half-hour I have counted 7s 6d worth of empty bottles.”-

When most of the gold-seekers broke down in their quest that fellow made a fortune. He never sampled a dish of dirt or pegged a claim, but with the undeviating instinct of a born collector he scoured the Golden Mile for bottles. When 10,000 diggers were brought to the verge of despair fay a beer famine caused by _ a scarcity of bottles, he “ came to light ” with his hoard, saved the gold-mining industry in those dry latitudes from extinction, and amassed sufficient wealth to become the managing director of a great brewery. MONEY IN BOTTLES. Some of the most talented “ bottlehos” are strangely unconscious of their marvellous gift. It is recorded that in Vienna after the war the captains of industry, in an orgy of financial inflation, built themselves many mansions. An architect and a layman went into partnership to exploit the great opportunity. It was the layman’s part to mix socially with the paper millionaires and to bring them to bis partner’s studio with commissions to build villas and palaces. The business prospered. The architect was a thrifty man, and he accumulated much wealth, which he invested in Government bonds. The layman gave way to the convivial temptations of his position and dissipated his earnings in wine. When inflation had run its ruinous course in Austria and the inevitable crash came the fortune of the thrifty architect was swallowed up in the dissolution of Government securities, and the thriftless layman reeled home to survey his cellars full of empty bottles. There they lay in the racks, thousands of “ empties,” mute monuments to his profligacy' and degeneration, hollow evidences of his bibulous folly. Bottles, everywhere, and not a bite to eatl For days he wandered about the distracted city pilfering crusts and potato peelings to allay his hunger and humbly begging an occasional glass of lager to drown his remorse. He who once had revelled with princes in baths of champagne was reduced to draining the dregs of pothouses. His melancholy deepened, and his disordered mind reverted from wine to water, with which he had had some acquaintance in infancy. He craved only water—quantities of it—sufficient to enable him to drown himself. Sitting on the river’s brink, he chanced to glance at a discarded newspaper. A headline caught his eye—‘ Great Scarcity of Bottles—Failure of the Glass Industry.’ In a dream he read on, at first scarcely comprehending the import of what he read, until at last dimly he began to perceive that here at the eleventh hour was salvation. Homeward ho went, his footsteps quickened by an incredible hope, to his cellars. There ho gloated on his bottles awhile, and then the spirit of the collector awakening irt him, ho sought out a brewery and there effected a deal which laid the foundation ,of a new fortune on the ashes of his dissipation, thereby proving that in a crisis it is advisable to be possessed of bottles as well as bonds MERELY HIRED. It is advisable here to utter a warning that in Australia the collector of bottles may find that they never can be his own property. A thrifty com mercialism has intervened, and on certain bottles—containers of beer, medicines, etc.—has stamped a brand intimating tha t they belong to the makers, and are hired only to the purchasers of their contents. It is provided, however, that certain authorised collectors, the agents of the makers, may pay tho householder for tho return of the bottles to their lawful owner. To an extent this system may cramp the style of the amateur collector, but commer-

cially considered it is said to be all to the good, because it prevents wastage of bottles. The embargo on the use of branded bottles may effect a moral purpose in some degree by restraining the sinister activities of certain citizens who make free use of the beer bottle as a lethal weapon. For if it is illegal to fill hired beer bottles with home-made tomato sauce and sell them to one’s relatives to help to pay the income tax, it may conceivably be against the law to demolish a social rival by a blow with a branded bottle. Yet in moments ot excitement it may bo impracticable to pause and discover whether the bottle is branded. WITH FUTURE. Oil the whole, collectors of bottles m the young country may take it as a general principle that glass bottles, regarded as curiosities, have a future rather than a past. Glass itself was invented in the cradles of ancient civilisations long ago and far away, and even there glass vessels of any antiquity are rarely found. Tho histories of Egypt and Babylon are read in bricks, tiles, and potsherds. They belong to the age of pottery; but it is certain that the age of glass bottles is developing very rapidly. Less than a thousand years hence the eager antiquarian will grope his way to tho underlying strength and weakness ot our present civilisation through catacombs of bottles. Scattered freely over the terrain of five continents, and marking hundreds of steamship routes along the sea floor of the great ocean highways, and in fragments beneath the courses of the luxurious air liners will be found, a millennium hence, the record of our wasteful and convivial social habits. Nations of to-day may then be judged by the quantities and qualities of then discarded bottles. There is serious risk that this method of judging a nation’s morality may lead to grievous error and injustice. For example, posterity will find in a bottlestrewn America apparent evidence cf drunkenness not warranted by the Prohibition laws of to-day. For the United States, the great dry country of this generation, is also, curiously, tho vastest manufacturer of bottles, it lias been estimated that the world production of bottles in 1925-26 was 26,014,000 gross. This represents an increase of about 300 per cent, in output within ten years. What the output may be if the • United States becomes wet again presents a truly staggering problem. What becomes of all the empty bottles that do not find their way into repeated use and ultimately into the glassmaker’s melting pot? judging by tlio present rapid increase in bottle production there must be a danger ot tho world becoming cluttered up with bottles. One recollects having heard of a growing mountain of empty bottles somewhere on the stock routes of the dry heart of Australia upon which every passing drover cnrelVly deposits his empty offerings. The shadow oi this heap never grows less, but continues a swelling monument to the everlasting thirst of mankind.