When you use as many bottles as H. H. Warner did for the marketing of his Safe Remedies, especially his Kidney & Liver Cure, you are bound to have some that slip through that contain errors. Warner was no exception and there are some classic error bottles that appear from time to time. Perhaps the most well-know of these “errors” is the so-called Left Hand Safe. In 1974, Seeliger reported that bottle appeared in both a double collar and blob version and was “[p]robably the most common embossing error appearing on Warner bottles. Several batches were made with safe hinges on the left side of bottle.”
Not being an expert in bottle manufacturing, I can’t tell you exactly what happened to cause this; however, the easy explanation would be that the mold was simply assembled incorrectly with the Safe facing the wrong direction. At some point, the error was noticed and corrected, but some of the error bottles made their way to Rochester and were filled and distributed to the public.
When I first started collecting Warner’s in the mid-1970′s, you would see these Left Hand Safe bottles with some regularity and they regularly sold in the $50-$60 range. In more recent years, these bottles show up less frequently and typically command prices in the $150-$200 range. Without question, these Warner’s bottles are very desirable and deserve a place in any Warner’s collection. If nothing else, they are a novelty. If anyone has more information on how this error occurred, please let me know and I’ll add it. In the meantime, keep looking for those Left Hand Safes.
