One of life's mystery's
Ebay never ceases to amaze me with the sheer volume of
"stuff" that comes to the auction block. Most of it is pretty ho-hum.
The quantity of "rare" and or "one of a kind" ten dollar
tool top whiskeys listed for $100~ boggles the mind. And yet, once in a blue
moon a real rarity appears. I spotted just such a thing this morning while
perusing the latest and greatest listings over morning coffee.
Listed by a seller named "badgerlaunch"; it's actually not
a bottle that caught my eye, but a cast iron (or brass or bronze) advertising go-with. It is the
first of these I recall seeing or even hearing of! At first glance I thought,
how cool; Wolters B ros. was running
a scam on Spruance Stanley & Co. by using their horse shoe logo on a saloon
giveaway. B ut a second glance at the
picture caused me to do a double take. WoTTers
B ros / not Wolters. Huh?
That's when the piece really caught my interest. I've never
seen any reference to Wolters B ros.
without being listed as "Wholesale" liquors; not "liquor dealers".
Not on a bottle, not on a shot glass and not on a billhead. And then the abbreviation
for California
A quick stroll through the S.F. historical newspaper archives
shows no recorded entity by the name of Wotters B ros.
from 1870 - 1900. Same goes for the city business directories. Ok, so let's
assume that it was a typo. Why stop there when you can have a two-fer and
really fowl up the order; hence the term "liquor dealers" instead of
wholesale liquors? If I recall, Cala was a little used abbreviation of California B ut why go to the bother of adding an extra vowel when
you could just as easily cast the letters Ca. or Cal.
This piece has all the ear markings of being the real deal,
instead of a modern Chinese or Indian fantasy repro (ie; fake) since it appears to be corroded and bears
evidence of having some sort of a faux copper plate at one time that has long
since eroded due to burial. My guess is that it was indeed an advertising give
away commissioned by Wolters B ros.
& Co. in the late 1880's or early 90's and it was rejected due to the
myriad of mistakes present.
1 comment:
It once held a clock with a cheap paper advertising face that fit within the "horseshoe". I have dug a few from different companies that had the works corroded away and the brass "horseshoe" nicely intact. There are a couple of them laying somewhere out back.
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