update to: "Blowing Smoke ..."

Please check out the interesting update (29 June 2024) with new photo at the boom of the 23 March 2024 blog post, "Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady." Just a little something extra, thanks to the contribution of one of my readers.

Come to Houston! Look into the Past through Amazing Glass

This is my personal invitation to you, my reader and my friend, to come to the most amazing assortment of bottles and glass that you’ll likely ever get to see in one place. But like watching for a meteor shower or a rainbow, you better be ready for it, before it’s gone forever. Give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you why this event will be something you’ll really enjoy.

     It’s important to me that you understand right here and now that everything I’m going to tell you about this once-in-a-lifetime event are my own thoughts and feelings about it – nobody put me up to doing a blog post about it – I’m doing it because I really think my friends and readers would enjoy it immensely if they visited even one or two days of the event. Many of the members of the Montgomery County Historical Commission and the Conroe Community Cemetery Research Project

read this blog, so please consider this your invitation to catch a rainbow of colorful memories that will stay with you for the rest of your life. I’m also not trying to list everything there is to do and see at this show – at the bottom of this post I will attach a link to the Event Information Packet that does a great job telling you about everything this show has in store for you – I strongly encourage you to look through it.

     Before we get too deep in the weeds, let me explain that I’m referring to the extravaganza that is being called Houston24 – the National Antique Bottle & Glass Expo. It’s a mega-event put on by the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors (FOHBC), the nationwide organization for people who love antique bottles and glass. It’s being held at the Hotel ZaZa Museum District in Houston, on 1-4 August, so it’s just a month away! The Expo is being hosted and underwritten by the Houston Museum of Natural Science  (across the street from Hotel ZaZa), which includes hosting two major bottle exhibitions at the museum during the Expo! Much more about what’s in it for you later in this blog post.

     Most of my friends who read my blog do so because they enjoy history. Stories of days long past, usually before our own lives began. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I capture this history primarily by looking at objects made of paper and glass – two of the most delicate, easily destroyed materials that man makes. Yet many paper and glass objects from centuries past survive into the 21st century. Paper items usually survive because they were tucked away in drawers, trunks, or books, but bottles are actually the “tough guys” of the antique world. I’ve been in many deep pits in the ground where only glass is found.

     The 18th and 19th century person didn’t just throw glass into their trash pits and outhouse holes, but that’s often the only thing that survives. There’s nothing like finding a bottle – ridiculously, improbably thin glass protecting empty space inside its fragile walls – completely intact, despite the literal tons of dirt and stones on top of it, cars parked over it, or even buildings constructed above it. Just crazy.

     Metal rusts and ultimately dissolves altogether; fabrics can’t stand up to moisture or bugs; leather rots and wood turns to mush in Mother Earth. Even we humans, who like to think of ourselves as the King of the Hill on this planet, so tough that we can beat anything nature throws at us, will someday end up in the ground where we will decay down to our bones – and eventually, as the Bible says, “unto dust thou shalt return.”

When it’s all over, cockroaches and bottles may be all that survive!

     Of the two, I only admire and collect bottles.

     Looking at an antique bottle is a transformative experience. You know you’re admiring a fragile old container that probably came out of the ground or from some dusty corner of a barn or attic, but there it is. Maybe the glass is a beautiful color that reminds you of honey, or strawberries, or the water in your swimming pool. Perhaps what catches your eye is the shape it was formed into – an old cabin, an ear of corn, or even a fish. You might even find yourself picking up a bottle that still has its ancient label promising the courageous customer to drink its contents for a cure of their annoying cough or even life-threatening cancer. Every one of them is a fabulous discovery with a story to tell. Look around – the tables at Houston24 are loaded with thousands of them. You find yourself standing in a living museum – a fantasy flea market of centuries-old treasures. You suddenly realize this is a great way to spend a day of your summer vacation!

     So, as promised, here are the things I’d like to tell you about this amazing event – in my own words. Like the song goes, these are a few of my favorite things …

A Rare National Event. This National Bottle and Glass Expo is a rare and exotic bird in its own right – no other bottle show in the country is quite like it. Every few years it shows up in different spots all over the U.S.A.; I believe there have been 36 expos over the last 47 years. This year’s expo in Houston is the first anywhere in Texas in the history of the FOHBC; I’m 69, so I strongly suspect that this will be the only expo in Texas in my lifetime. This is a NATIONAL EXPO – not just another show. If you live in Texas, you really need to visit this expo, before it’s gone forever!

Displays & Seminars. There are going to be a bunch of folks selling an amazing array of bottles, but there will also be 7 top-notch seminars and 17 killer displays to see. Collectors from around the country are pouring out their heart and soul to show you the pride of their collections through their presentations and displays. They spend months selecting which pieces and putting together awesome displays and fascinating seminars so that you can enjoy looking at and learning about them. The displayers pack up, transport, unpack, set up, display, pack up again, and transport them all back home and not a one earns a single penny for doing all this – we do it out of love and pride in our collections and to share what we have and what we know with everyone who comes by for a visit. That’s pure love, my friends. How can you not want to see all that love and passion in one place?

Kids on Display. Before I get off the subject of displays, I’ve got to share something very special that will be happening this year: Display Table #1 will have a display called “Kids Digging Texas,” put together by Grayson, Crosby, and Lyla – two brothers and a sister, ages 13, 9, and 7! They go bottle digging frequently with their dad and they will be showing some amazing bottles they have found, along

with others they enjoy collecting. Crosby will even have his book, Old Bottles, on display that he wrote and illustrated for a school project! These kids represent the future of our hobby, so please make sure to visit and talk with them about their display. Their enthusiasm and excitement about bottles will be a great way for you to start your experience at the show!

Variety of People. Something else I’m going to love about this show is the variety of people that are going to be there. For example: our displayers are coming from California, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Florida, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas; our seminar presenters are coming from California, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Texas; and we have attendees coming from more than half of the states in the U.S., plus Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Great Britain. How much fun it will be to meet fellow collectors and bottle enthusiasts from all over the country and the world. I am genuinely looking forward to making a bunch of new friends in this great hobby. Normally it might be tricky for a guy from Australia to have a conversation with a guy from Louisiana, but they both talk the language of antique bottles, so that story will have a happy ending!

Variety of Bottles. Let me help my non-bottle friends to have their eyes opened a little bit – here’s a pop-quiz:

In 20 seconds, how many kinds of bottles can you list out loud? Answer: There are lots and lots of bottle types! Your list may have had liquor bottles, soda bottles, perfume bottles, beer bottles, and, if you’re an old guy like me, you might even remember milk bottles. Well, just a hundred years ago, there were no liquids in unbreakable cartons, and glass bottles carried everything from candy to fire extinguisher chemicals! There will be a huge selection of bottle types being sold on the show floor and I will be learning what the bottle dealers are bringing to Houston right along with you! But since I’m in charge of the displays, I can tell you that just among those 17 displays you will see soda water bottles, cabin-shaped bottles, an extremely rare Indian bitters bottle, pontiled snuff bottles, Texas pottery, cider bottles, soda bottles, reverse glass signs and bottles, barbershop bottles and much more!

Partnered with a Major Museum! The FOHBC’s Houston24 Expo was clearly going to be a really big event in Houston no matter what, but its relationship with the Houston Museum of Natural Science turns this into a classic, once-in-a-lifetime event. The museum is hosting TWO major exhibitions of antique bottles while Houston24 is being held across the street. A world-class collection of American antique bottles and another of stunningly beautiful barber bottles. There will even be full-color exhibition catalogs of both exhibitions for sale. So you can go to the museum to be inspired by great glass treasures and then walk over to the show across the street to buy a bottle and start your own epic exhibition!

Dinosaur Banquet. On Friday night, August 2nd, the FOHBC and the Museum of Natural Science are joining together again to have a banquet right in the middle of the museum’s dinosaur exhibit! How amazing is this going to be – eating your meal under the massive skeletons of these ancient monsters, staring down at you from their hollow eyes, with giant teeth sizing you up as the next meal for their very empty stomachs! There’s no way you’re ever going to forget this evening among the dinosaurs!

“Glass in the Grass”. The genius behind Houston24 – the Wizard behind our Oz – is the passionate bottle collector and expert, Ferdinand Meyer V. On July 31st, one day before Houston24 begins, he and Elizabeth, his brave and equally skilled life partner, have added still more to the festivities for antique bottle and glass enthusiasts, by opening their Texas hacienda to a first-ever “Glass in the Grass” event. Under the shade of their pecan trees, dealers will be selling their amazing bottles from the tailgates of their trucks and the trunks of their cars. This event is free to the public. I believe this will become a

new Texas tradition – the Houston version of a very popular tailgating event that was held for years in Connecticut in the autumn.

     Some of the events, like the seminars and the Glass in the Grass are free and others cost just five bucks if you come on August 3rd or 4th (Saturday or Sunday). My seminar on Friday, for example, is one of the freebies – yup, I’m cheap – but I guarantee I’ll tell you some things about old bottles and history that you’ve never heard about before! Actually all three seminars on Friday and the two on Saturday are free to the public – and they’re all going to be extremely interesting!

     For all the details click on the link below. From the Kids Digging Texas to the Dinosaur Banquet, this is going to be one very special, Texas-sized event. Please plan on visiting Houston24 – you really will be glad you did. See you there!

I am going to be one of the seminar speakers and a displayer at Houston24. I hope to see YOU there, taking in my free seminar or visiting my display – just two of the many things to see and do at this great Houston experience.

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine

Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady

NOTICE: This article has been updated as of 20 June 2024: additional image of a woman smoking in an ashtray - contributed by Sonny Jackson of California. See bottom of article - well worth the look!

The 1890s were a decade squarely focused on ideal form and fashion: women with hourglass shapes, perfect complexions, and smoldering Gibson Girl looks, expertly coiffed and always wearing the latest fashions. No one felt the strain of presenting properly for public appearance more than the Victorian woman. She was told by men and media to be stylish, beautiful, and a lady. There was more pressure on a woman to be ideal than there was on her body from the corset she wore, and just like the corset, she was expected to maintain proper form all day long. It was considered undeniable that she was “the weaker sex,” physically and intellectually inferior to men, dependent upon and subservient to her husband, and designed for beauty, virginal modesty, domestic duty, and motherhood. Any behaviors breaching this mold were viewed as morally, socially, and physically dangerous, and signs of an unvirtuous and fallen woman – certainly no lady.

A perfect example of this physical and behavioral confinement of woman was the rigid social construct that a gentleman could freely smoke but a lady never should. A New York physician’s statement on the matter was copied in many newspapers as if it was a public service health announcement:

… ladies … take the use of cigarettes to their very great detriment. … men are [not] often injured by the moderate use of tobacco in smoking. But the female body is no more adapted to the use of tobacco than the female mind is to mathematics. It causes neuralgia, headache, dyspepsia, palpitation of the heart, and worse than all, ruins the complexion and disorders the teeth. ... all will agree that the stale odor of tobacco coming from a woman's mouth is worse than the same smell exhaled by a man. ... men's nervous systems are not so impressionable as women's, and hence a man can do many things with impunity, or even benefit, which would be impossible for a woman to do without great risk. ... beauty ... is the smallest gift a woman can have, for it not only means aesthetic enjoyment for all that look at her, but it means a healthy mind and a healthy body ...

Cigarette display box label - updated image, 3/28/2024; collection of the author

Poor frail, fragile creatures, the doctor insisted, clearly the weaker sex ...

Despite laws and social mores, women and adolescents were smoking those “obnoxious and injurious cigarettes” and men and boys were spitting out tobacco juice at or across the path of oncoming members of the fairer sex for amusement or out of sheer meanness. Tobacco use was becoming ubiquitous and its smokey seduction was settling over men, women, and children across the country like a London fog. On January 1st, 1891, a newspaper squib read, “A good many New Year anti-tobacco resolutions will end up in smoke.”

Some companies quickly recognized the growing interest of young women to explore the cigarette experience by sneaking smokes, so they tried to pitch the social acceptability of allegedly medicinal cigarettes to alleviate symptoms of colds, allergies and asthma (pretty much all conditions falling under the catch-all term, catarrh). A few of these products, like Perrin’s and Marshall’s, offered cigarettes made from cubebs, a tropical bush of the pepper family with a very pungent taste and aroma that was often difficult for the smoker and bystanders to enjoy. But hey, it’s medicine, and strong, off-putting aromas and flavors were considered signs of its medicinal qualities and benefits: if it was yucky, it must be good medicine.

The two companies were producing the same type of medicated cigarettes, using the dried-up, ground berries of the cubeb plant, but their approach to advertising was very different.

Dr. Perrin’s advertising trade card showed their cubeb cigarettes being used by the whole family: Grampa and Gramma are in the lower corners, both looking old and weary; the son in this family is wearing knickers and has schoolbooks tucked under his arm and his sister is in the other corner (with a short skirt that emphasized her youth rather than suggesting her to be a fallen woman); and in the center was mom, relaxing in her comfy stuffed chair, her feet up on the hassock, a book in one hand and her Dr. Perrin’s cigarette in the other. The message was clear: cubeb cigarette smoking is okay – "everyone's doing it." The smoke that emanates from the entire family's cigarettes or lips is clear – it was purposely understated to make the activity less offensive and to get the reader to focus on the medicinal nature of the advertising message. Perrin’s was trying to encourage the use of their cubeb cigarettes by both sexes and all ages because of the product’s alleged health benefits for all; they were definitely trying to avoid any impression that they were attempting to break Victorian mores.

Marshall’s went in the opposite direction with the subtlety of a runaway freight train. What I find especially interesting about the Marshall’s advertising matter shown here is the manufacturer’s effort to show that the trademark woman smoking their cubeb cigarette is still the Victorian ideal of a beautiful, genteel lady. But if that was the intention, it just doesn’t work. It seems highly unlikely that those who frowned on females smoking could have their opinions changed by this image. She looks like a tough,

hardened woman with smoke rising from her cigarette and her lips; she’s not even trying to exhale discreetly to the side. She looks completely relaxed, not at all worried about being caught in a guilty pleasure – and she is purposely blowing billowing plumes of smoke like a factory smokestack, not to mention that she is demonstrating a skill at creative smoking – not just making smoke rings, but a full advertising message: “Marshall’s Prep’d” ("Prepared," emphasizing they were ready-made, so ladies didn't have to futz around with rolling the ground cubebs into cigarette papers like the men were constantly doing to make their tobacco cigarettes). So by skywriting in smoke she had “skills,” I guess, but she still looks more like a saloon floozie than a Victorian lady.

Then again, that may be exactly the type of woman Marshall’s was going for – not a floozie, but a young woman who was ready and willing to break barriers, listen to her own desires and blow smoke in the face of stodgy, controlling husbands, crusty clergy, and prim society women who still weren’t willing to make waves – or clouds of smoke.

For more on Victorian women and cigarettes, see:

     PROMISING CURES,

Vol.3, Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction

Vol.4, Chapter 10: Exposing the Naked Truth

UPDATE (28 March 2024): My dear friend, Barbara Rusch, offered me the use of the following image from her collection as an appropriate addition to this post on the Victorian cultivation of young women as smokers. She called it my article on "Smokin' Hot Women" - indeed, a better title for this topic than I had given to this blog. Given the manufacturer's use of this young model to promote Sweet Sixteen cigarettes (not "medicinal" cubebs but actual tobacco cigarettes), this advertisement is clearly designed not only to sell this brand of cigarettes but to encourage the sexualization of young women and immodest behavior. Then as now; some things never change.

Courtesy of the Barbara Rusch Collection.

UPDATE (29 June 2024): Sonny Jackson of California sent me this image of an ashtray he owns. He immediately thought of the great graphics in the ashtray when he read my article, "Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady", "Smokin' Hot Women" in the July/August 2024 issue of Antique Bottle & Glass Collector. He wrote to me:

"This item was dug here in the San Francisco Bay area and dates between the late 1890s to sometime after the San Francisco earthquake. ... A young friend gave it to me about 45 years ago - he dug out in Hastings Slough near Concord.  Looks like maybe it's made of some type of pewter. The little emblem in the left top corner shows the Capital and says Washington, DC.  Measures approximately 5 x 7 inches."

Thanks so much for sending me this image, Sonny. I love how the design combines the young woman and the smoke of her cigarette. If you follow the smoke trail from her cigarette, it becomes the long strands of her hair, or vice versa. I also think its more than just coincidence that the geometry of the smoke rings she's artfully blowing is repeated in her hoop earring. The subliminal message seems to be that through her vice, she and the cigarette have become one.

The surreal element turns out to be the U.S. Capitol building framed by the words "Capitol" and "Washington D.C.," hovering over the back side of her head. It's obviously nothing more than an indication that it is a souvenir from the nation's capitol, but masters of metaphor might imply that the government was sanctioning the ruin of women by allowing the tobacco industry to continue turning cigarettes into the national vice.

Courtesy of the Sonny Jackson Collection.

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine