Warner’s Safe Cure: The Rochester “A” List (Part I)

A couple years ago, I attempted to put together a list of Warner’s Safe Cures that are the most difficult varieties to get.  I called it the “A” Lists. I did this with the help of other knowledgeable Warner’s collectors. I had originally set out to do a “Top 10 List,” but I found that it was difficult to arrange the rarest Warner’s in any meaningful order and that it necessarily meant comparing apples to oranges. Instead, I settled for a list of rare Warner’s in no particular order. Since the A-List was published, I have heard from numerous collectors with suggested additions to the list as well as other improvements.

This time around, I am going to group the rare Warner’s by office and I will include a picture, either from my collection or another. This will include reference to Ed Ojea’s Warner’s Reference Guide site. As is appropriate, I will start where it all started in Rochester. Although Rochester is the  source of the most ubiquitous Warner bottle, the Kidney & Liver Cure, it also produced a few rarer examples. The rarity of a Warner bottle may be as much about color as it is about type. A perfect example is the Kidney & Liver Cure. The standard K&L Cure will fetch anywhere from $18-25 depending on condition. However, if you come  up with an example that is a very pale amber or has shades of green, the rarity and value is enhanced dramatically.

Turning to the Rochester variants, the best place to start is with the early Warner’s Cures packaged in bottles produced at the Chambers Works in Pittsburgh. These bottles are characterized by the “gravestone” shaped slug plate that traces the edge of the entire face of the bottle and by the acronym “A&DHC” embossed on the base of the bottle for Alexander and David H. Chambers. The K&L Cure from Chambers Works catapults to the $100-125 range. Other Warner’s bottles produced by the Chambers Works include the NERVINE,  DIABETES CURE,  BITTERS (Pint and Half Pint),  TONIC (Pint & Half Pint) and TONIC BITTERS (Pint and Half Pint).

I have pictured several examples above (courtesy of Ed Ojea), which illustrate the typical Chambers Works bottle. Note that the pints are topped with the double collar lip, while the half pints typically have the medicine lip. Although “A&HDC” usually appears on the base, that is not true on every bottle. Of the Chambers Works Warner’s, the hardest to get are the DIABETES CURE, the NERVINE (half pint), the TONIC BITTERS (both sizes) and the BITTERS (half pint).

In the next part, I will take on some of the other Warner rarities from Rochester.

Warner’s Safe Cure: Slug Plates

From time to time, you will hear bottle collectors refer to the term “slug plate” in their description of a particular bottle, usually one that is BIMAL (“blown in mold applied lip”). In his Glossary of Antique Bottle Terms, Reggie Lynch defines a slug plate as a “metal plate inserted into a bottle mold to provide product specific info to an otherwise generic mold. Also refers to the mark left on a bottle by such a plate.” Slug plates were fairly extensively used by bottle manufacturers probably as a cost saving measure to allow them to customize a particular bottle for a patron without having to create an entirely new mold.

Slug plate marks turns up on a variety of Warner’s Safe bottles beginning with Warner’s intial offerings, which were manufactured for him by the Chambers Works in Pittsburg. See Warner’s Safe Cure: The Early Bottles and Warner’s Safe Cure: Bitters. Warner’s early bottles featured, among other things, a full slug plate. Apparently, when Warner ordered a particular type of bottle, whether it be his Safe Kidney & LIver Cure or his Safe Bitters, the Chambers Works simply put that particular slug plate in the generic mold and turned out whatever quantity was ordered. The imprint of the full slug plate is obvious on the face of the bottle and serves to mark it as one of his early variants valued by collectors.

If you think the slug plates were limited to Warner’s early Rochester bottles, you would be wrong. Although the full slug appears unique to the early bottles, Warner and those from whom he purchased his bottles, used slugs in later bottles. It appears that those slugs served two principal purposes, they allowed Warner to alter that name of a particular product contained in a bottle (e.g. Nervine for Safe Cure) and to alter the foreign office using the mold (e.g. Frankfurt for London). As was mentioned earlier, the bottles for the Melbourne office were initially manufactured in the United States and shipped to Australia given the primitive state of bottle manufacturing at that time. A couple of examples that demonstrate Warner’s use of slug plates in this fashion are the Frankfurt half pint Nervine, which was clearly slugged from the mold of the London half pint and bears the rectangular slug mark to prove it. Another is the early Melbourne bottles which show that the word “Melbourne” is slug plated in, probably from a mold otherwise used for Rochester or perhaps London bottles. These are but a couple of examples and others exist. Indeed, they represent an interesting and, undoubtedly unintentional, fingerprint of bottle makers of the time.

Thanks to Ed Ojea for the photos comparing the half pint Frankfurt with the half pint Londons, which clear show the slug marks.

Warner’s Safe Cure – Bitters

Anyone who collects bottles is familiar with the term “bitters.”  Bitters refers generically to a group of bottles that packaged a concoction of roots and herbs with a distinct bitter flavor compounded with alcohol. Understandably there are bottle collectors that confine their collections strictly to bitters bottles, including figural bitters. Without a doubt, bitters bottles occupy a significant place in the hearts and minds of collectors. Although Warner did not have collectors in mind when he introduced his bitters, he was, no doubt, aware of the market for such a product.

Warner produced a bitters product from the time that he introduced his first line of products in 1879-1880 until about 1883. The half pint of the Tonic Bitters continued after 1883 for whatever reason. Warner produced three bottles that contained bitters: Safe Bitters (pint and half pint), Safe Tonic (pint and half pint) and Safe Tonic Bitters (pint and half pint). I have also seen a Safe Tonic bottle with a Safe Tonic Bitters label (pictured above), so there was some interchangability among the products.  In the 1879 Almanac, Warner described the Safe Tonic as follows:

Warner’s Safe Tonic does not differ from the Safe Bitters in effect, except that the Tonic contains less stimulant properties and is therefore preferable for use where in order to obtain the alternative and blood purifying effect of the medicine it is necessary to use it at short intervals and for a longer period.

All of these bottles in both the pint and half pint sizes are valued by Warner collectors ranging from the Safe Tonic as Scare to the Safe Bitters and Safe Tonic Bitters as Rare. As a rule, the half pints are much more difficult to acquire than the pints and the half pint Tonic may be considered Rare. Not many collectors can say they have all six varieties and those that do are not likely to part with them easily.

Warner is not known for figural bottles. The notable exception is his Tippecanoe Bitters that was introduced in 1883. Stay tuned for more on that wonderful bottle.

Warner’s Safe Cure: The Early Bottles

When Warner first began producing his Remedies, his available products were limited to his Safe Kidney & Liver Cure, Safe Pills, Safe Bitters and Safe Diabetes Cure. He picked up where Craig left off in more than one way. Not only did he purchase the right to produce Craig’s Cure, he adopted the amber bottle that had packaged his cures. Although the embossed Safe would become one of his trade marks (See Beware of Fraud!), one of his earliest bottles had no Safe embossed on it. Rather, Warner’s Safe Cure was embossed around the shoulders of the bottle. This shoulder embossed Warner’s Safe Cure (WRG 7) was thought by Seeliger to be the first Warner bottle used; however, based on the existence of a labelled version of the bottle owned by Jack Stecher, he and Ojea suggested the bottle may have been used as late as 1883 as a transition bottle before Warner released his 3 Cities bottles (Rochester, Toronto and London). This idea was based on the fact that the label listed not only the Rochester office, but also the Toronto (1882) and London (1883) offices. The shoulder embossed Safe Cure used to be a fairly common Warner’s bottle; however, as they have been taken off the market include personal collections, these bottles have become increasingly difficult to obtain and WRG now classifies them as “Scarce.”

The early Warner bottles are also characterized by the so-called “double collar”  or sometimes the “medicine collar,” both of which were later replaced by the blob collar, and by a full slug plate on the face of the bottle. If you look on the base of these early bottles, you will frequently, although not always, see the mark of the bottle maker “A&DHC”. This mark represents the product of Alexander & David H. Chambers or the Chambers Works of Pittsburgh (1843-1889). These early Warner’s bottles with the double or medicine collar, full slug plate and A&DHC mark are much more difficult to obtain by collectors and are rated as Scare to Rare by WRG.