Customer Reviews

Kovels' Bottles Price List: 12th Edition

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It had a lot of good information, but hardly ANY pictures to help identify the bottles. The good pictures were of bottles most of us will never see or find. What about the bottles we find at auctions, garage sales etc. Lots of us are NOVICE collectors, and we need more pictures to help us identify what we have. As far as I'm concerned, I've wasted my money. It isn't much help to this new novice. If your a professional bottle collector, this is the book for you.

This was one of the first bottle books I got to start categorizing my extensive collection. I am far from being a novice, however, my end-goal was to price some of my rarer bottles, and this book did that pretty well. What I found disappointing was the total LACK of photos (hardly any), and large gaping holes in sections such as "cures", "medicines", and "bitters". Hardly any of us will ever see a $4000 bottle in our lifetime other than online - but Kovels' persists in only showing photographs of the rarest of bottles. Not to mention, many of their prices are extremely inflated estimates obviously made by someone of Sotheby's blood, not us plain ol' diggers. To be honest, this book helped ID about 20% of my bottles in my bottle collection - so I found it useful, and since it was a gift, even more so - I doubt if I'd buy it myself. More pictures, better categorization, and breaking the book into smaller books with more detailed pictures is what I would do. This book could easily be broken into 10 better books with some effort. Novice bottle collectors would be better off trying Antique Glass and Bottle Collectors magazine if you want better information and pictures.

Organized by bottle type (medicine, beer, etc.), this comprehensive book quickly enables the reader to track down a wide variety of bottles from by-gone days. The authors have wisely included descriptions of various bottle types and their intended uses. This will help novice bottle collectors to better research their bottles as the purpose of many bottled products no longer holds any signficance to modern folks (this is especially true for medicines and elixirs that existed before the dawn of the Food & Drug Administration). Readers would be better served if more pictures could be found as well as timelines regarding a bottler's production dates. But the omission of these items is understandable regarding the overall convenience and ease of using this book.

Good, but not for fruit jars. I should have done more research. Seems that the 'Red Book' would have been a a better way to go for getting prices on Mason (and similar) fruit jars. Otherwise, this book is very well done.