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I met a guy once who referred to himself as “one of the undesirable unemployables.” I had no idea why he would call himself that; he was a charming guy with a good reputation and was a hard-working entrepreneur.

But in the late 2000s, when the recession hit, I was forced to sell my business at a loss and I discovered first-hand what he was talking about. Like him, I was in my 50s, and for different reasons than him, was making a career change. And as a longtime self-employed guy in his 50s, typing up a resume and getting a good-paying job is a mountain you’ve never climbed.

Trying to find employment in your 50s is a challenge all on its own. People doing the hiring wonder (rightly so) if you will be comfortable taking orders or putting up with the younger crew. They’ll also wonder how long you’ll last as an employee and if it’s worth the expense of training you. Then, when you do get a job, you believe you’re so much more experienced than everyone else but wind up feeling slow and always out of the loop because everyone else knows the computer codes and the passwords and the how to change fonts and update their apps and text straight while driving.

So, I decided to make use of my business experience and my experience buying and selling antiques over the years, and go back in to business as an auctioneer.

So I traced my steps back a couple of decades and went back to my when I started my restaurant and catering business. I had gone to culinary school and was a chef, and my first steps in to business were taking a course in basic accounting at a local college and doing a local market study; basically going to lots of other businesses, looking around and taking notes. Then I made a list of questions that I wanted answered and took a few different restaurant owners I knew out to lunch, telling them what I was up to. I found that most entrepreneurs are more than happy to share their knowledge and opinions. I would ask them questions you can’t look up in a book (or now online). Questions like, “if you could do this all over again, would you?” and “what’s the part of the business you hate the most?” (it was usually dealing with insurance and tracking down unpaid bills).

Another favorite was, “If you did it again, what would you do differently?”

So, to begin my new venture, and while I was trying to bring in income with other seasonal work, I took those first steps again. I put together a business plan for myself.

AUTHOR’S ASIDE: As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that on this new business venture, I haven’t fully put my business plan on paper. It’s a time-worn basic for success, so bad on me. It may be that I’m gun-shy this time around and I’m just putting my toe in the water to see how it goes. You might say I’m still in a “little risk, little reward” phase. That comes with having kids to think of. And it’s hard not to be more cautious.

Nevertheless, I took those first steps, and then moved on to the real step that let the world know I was serious about this business. I applied for my auctioneer’s license. I tracked down the very tedious rules and regulations information available online and made an appointment to be tested. In Maine, auctioneers can test only four times a year, so if you fail the test, you have to wait three months to take your next text.

Still, I’m a pretty smart guy, I’ve worked part-time for auctioneers for years, and my auction buddies all told me the test was a piece of cake.

I’m sure you can guess where this is going. I went to my mailbox and found a letter from the State of Maine that I assumed was my shiny new auctioneer’s license, only to read that I had failed it by one question!

A three months delay because of one stupid question! I won’t go in to details about how the next couple of months went, but let’s just say that I didn’t take it well. But I studied hard and went back three months later and passed with only one wrong answer this time. Lesson learned.

So, during this time, and for many months prior, I had been doing house cleanouts via word of mouth, and had been finding and buying items for auction. I made a deal with a couple of old auction buddies of mine and asked them to walk me through my first auction. Then, after a few sleepless nights and some nervous knots in my gut, my new company—Hepburn and Co. Antiques—held its first auction.

On June 23, 2015, a pretty good crowd showed up, and the auction went smoothly. The “sold” prices for the items seemed really low, some of them cringe-worthy. But I was warned ahead of time that when you’re on the other side of the gavel, it just feels like everything is selling cheap!

The customers were happy, though, and say they are looking forward to my next auction at the end of October. I can’t wait, to tell you the truth. I know it was only one auction, but that initial fear of the unknown is gone, and I’ve got lots of good stuff to sell.

Now, I can start working on my chant: “Who’ll gimme 50? Hamina, hamina, hamian… I’ve got 50! Now, who’ll gimme 75?

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Bram Hepburn collects 19th-century New England bottles and glass, having spent the last 30 years digging and diving for bottles in New England and upstate New York. He has just founded an estate liquidation company and auction house, Hepburn and Co. Antiques in Eliot, Maine. You can send an email to him at askus@hepburnandcoantiques.com

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

For those of us who have been collecting enthusiasts for more than 30-plus years, the advent of eBay was a colossal game-changer. In my specialty—collecting antique American bottles—it has certainly been the case.

In the 1970 and ’80s, someone who bought and sold bottles—or dug them out of the ground like me—had two places to sell or trade them. One was flea markets, where you could spend most of your day explaining to non-collectors why anyone would pay $50 for an empty old bottle while you waited and hoped that an actual collector would come along. The other place would be at your bottle-collecting club’s annual antique bottle show, if you were lucky enough to live in an area where there was an antique bottle club (almost all of which had annual shows).

What would happen at these shows would be that every collector/dealer would jam their year’s-worth of bottle finds onto their show tables, trying to thin out their collection, and hoping to pick up something special to add to their own collection back home. But what began to happen was that dealers wound up passing around the same bottles from one dealer to the next. Trading got stale and slowed over the years. You’d often attend a show and recognize some of the same bottles on tables that were there the year before.

Then came eBay! Suddenly, you could spend the months in between shows selling you’re your unwanted bottle inventory. You had a new, international audience. Any bottle with a proprietors last name embossed on it, like “Woodford,” might now have interest by anyone named Woodford who thought it intriguing that a possible ancestor of theirs may have had their own brand—maybe an elixir or cure-all that was peddled out of a covered wagon or Western storefront.

Suddenly, bottle collectors’ “common” bottle inventories could be turned to cash, month by month, and then when they showed up at the annual show, they had an extra $1,000 in “bottle money” to spend. And in the nerdy little sub culture of antique bottle collecting, the economy got a huge jolt. Like a national stimulus bill, injecting cash into a sluggish economy by building roads, bridges and infrastructure, the bottle collecting world leaped into a whole new era of wheeling and dealing.

This buzz of activity peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As listing methods on eBay became much easier, with digital cameras and eBay Super Stores, the supply finally overtook the demand, and anyone who went along for the whole eBay ride wound up feeling like the end was near for our hobby, saying things like “bottles are down, way down” while shaking their heads forlornly.

Where it leaves us now, in the antique bottle world at least, is with prices that are not nearly as volatile but more polarized. Common bottle values are very affordable, while prices for rare “investment-type” bottles have generally continued to soar.

In fact, eBay bottle dealers have so perfected their selling methods that prices are now freakishly consistent from seller to seller, especially with lower- and mid-range bottles. Those common bottles are still over supplied to the market, and their values are now very easy to determine.

As with any collectable now, you can determine its value using eBay’s “completed” and “sold” results. If you have a type of bottle you want to know the value of, you’d log on to eBay, then refine your search to “Collectables” to “Bottles and Collectables” and then “Bottles.” If you want to, at this point, you can choose a sub category such as “Bitters, Medicines, etc.,” and each category will pull up a couple thousand bottles that are currently being offered at auction or for a “Buy It Now” price.

When I search, I do two more things: I click on “completed items” and I look at the number of items listed, say for example 1,500 items. Then I go back and click on “sold items” (instead of completed) and look at the number of bottles listed there from that same category. It may say 800, for example, or 200 or 1,000. This step helps me gauge the “demand” for a particular category of bottle. It’s not an exact science, but if you notice that many bottles are being listed, and not many actually wind up being sold, it can help determine if it is a good week to be selling, or buying, like investing in stocks.

To find the value of a specific bottle, it is pretty easy to plug it in to the search bar on eBay and then look at what comes up. You may find 10 bottles exactly like yours currently listed for sale, which will tell you that it’s not a rare bottle. But it won’t tell you much else, though. A mistake often made is that someone will see a bottle listed as a “Buy It Now” price of $500 and, indulging in a little wishful thinking, believe that a similar bottle they own is also worth $500. After all, “I’ve seen these selling on eBay for $500!”

Obviously, the way to determine the current market value of a bottle is to look under the “sold items” section in the left-hand search column, which shows recent realized prices. If you see five different examples of the same bottle bring prices ranging from $50 to $150, you’ve got a pretty good idea of its worth, at least over the last 30 days or so. For historic pricing, WorthPoint’s Worthopedia is a much better gauge, as its database of sales records goes back several years.

Condition is Everything
You can learn everything you need to know about what makes a bottle valuable by looking at the descriptions of those items. You can almost bet that every time a bottle brought a lower price, it was because of damage—even minor damage—to the bottle, especially to the lip.

If you every go to a bottle show and pay attention, you’ll see serious collectors pick up the best-looking bottle on the table first and run the lip around their hand in a circle. If they find a chip on the lip, they’ll hold it up to the light, scrutinizing it, running their finger over it, scratching the chip with their finger nail, etc. They will become obsessed with the chip for a while and then, almost always, always walk away saying something like, “oh, that’s too bad…”

You could have a open pontil Farleys ink bottle on your table, which could be worth up to $1,000 in nice condition, but if it has a chip in the lip, you’d be lucky to get $100. That’s just the way it goes.

Even lesser damage, such as a flake, or a substantial scratch, bruise, stain or sickness in the glass which won’t come out, will bring the price down, giving you that price difference that you’ll see between an run-of-the-mill bottle and one in pristine condition.

Other details of a bottle that will bring varied price results for the same bottle are “whittle marks” (the whittle-like marks adding texture to the glass) and small bubbles and impurities in the glass (which add crudity and character to an old bottle). Also, the intensity of the color of the glass can be a big deal. “Pale” aqua is not generally a good color, but if it is a deeper, more vivid aqua blue, you’ll see descriptors like “great color!” used, often boosting the prices.

If you’re in the market for antique bottles right now, it is a great time to buy. If you’re buying them as genuine 100-year-old decor, or as a lover of history, or you are starting out as a pure hobbyist, you will be able to buy bottles now for often half the price that you could 10 years ago.

However, for the $1,000-and-up-priced bottle, rare pontiled medicines, historical flasks, rare Civil War-vintage bitters bottles, etc., you may well be buying high. And if you wind up down the road getting rid of that bottle by “selling low,” you’ll wish you just put your money in the bank instead.

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Bram Hepburn collects 19th-century New England bottles and glass, having spent the last 30 years digging and diving for bottles in New England and upstate New York. He lives in Eliot, Maine.

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

Something you see for sale at almost any flea market or tag sale are antique telegraph insulators. These are the heavy glass fittings found at the top of telephone poles, about the size of a softball, that hold and insulate electric wires from the wooden pole. They were manufactured by the hundreds of thousands, most of them are extremely common, so understandably you will see them selling for a buck a piece, which makes it somewhat shocking to find out what their value potential can actually be, if you find the right one.

With what seems like a very minor difference in form, embossed lettering or color, that one dollar insulator could be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

That large swing in value is generally associated with the insulators rarity. Of all the antiques and collectables I have collected or researched over the years, telegraph insulator collecting is one of the most detail-sensitive fields I have ever encountered. For an advanced insulator collector, finding a historically important, rare and esthetically pleasing specimen can be a lifetime obsession. And for the non-collector who sees them seemingly everywhere at yard sales and thrift shops, the concept of their potential value can be hard to get a grasp on.

As a bottle digger and collector over the years, I would come across insulators and knew the basics, but didn’t research them fully, and pretty much dismissed them. Then by chance, I wound up picking up an insulator at a yard sale, and paid $5 for it, because it just looked different enough to warrant checking into it. To my shock, I sold it at auction for more than $3,000. That was the wake-up call that prompted me to study the subject more fully, and there was plenty to learn.

I found that the insulator I had happened upon dated back to the 1870s and was used on one of the first telegraph lines, strung from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Washington, D.C., running, as most telegraph lines did—alongside a railroad track—which was an ideal place to run lines, where the pathway was already cleared and maintained by the railroad.

The way it was described to me by an advance insulator collector, I found it fascinating, and it helped me appreciate why a specific insulator might be so desirable. He told me that during that period in American history, the only way to get “news” from England and Europe over here to the U.S.—and more specifically in this case, to Washington DC—was by ocean steamship. And the ultimate in fastest ways to get a message from this point A to point B was for telegraph operators on board these ships, to be the first people off the ships as they entered Halifax. So they were lowered down into smaller rowboats or dinghies, racing to the docks and then racing down the docks to the nearest telegraph station. I could picture them racing into a little telegraph station, quickly sitting down and tapping out the urgent news from London or Paris. It must have felt magical for them to know that within seconds, their message was being relayed to Washington, D.C., where the president may be sitting at a table, listening as the news is read to him.

And while I didn’t quit my job and devote my life to collecting insulators, it was awesome to think that the insulator I had in my hands, carried the wire that held those historically important messages. And because of the research and record keeping of the people involved in this field, it could be proved that my insulator could be traced back to that one important line.

For someone not so interested in the hobby, but wanting to have a crash course in telegraph insulators, there are two major simple points that are helpful from the start. The first point is that virtually all insulators can be divided into one of two categories: “threaded” or “threadless.”

Threadless insulators are older and much rarer. They were used before screw threads were patented and used universally, and the insulators were simply tapped on to the tops of pegs on the telegraph poles. These did not work well, as a good wind storm could yank the insulator off the peg. When screw threads were implemented, the threadless ones were replaced, sometimes wacked with a hammer, with the broken pieces falling to the ground at the base of the pole. Other times, much to the appreciation of collectors, they were replaced more gently and discarded in a trash dump, left there to hopefully be recovered a century later, like old bottles and pottery.

The other point is less black and white, but still helpful. It is that there are three insulator manufacturing companies that dominated the industry, and their embossed lettering appears on the face of these insulators. Those companies are Whitall Tatum, Brookfield and Hemingray. As a general rule, any insulator that has embossing other than these is worth taking a second look at, as it could be rare. Don’t misunderstand—those three companies made variants of insulators, variants in form and color, which can be very, very valuable. But typically, with numbers of their common insulators being sold in box lots out in the market, it is a fair bet—not a sure bet—but a fair bet, that they are the common dollar variety.

Insulators are categorized by advanced collectors by a CD number (consolidated design number). I have always admired the meticulous work and research that insulator collectors put in to their hobby. It is so detailed and accurate that it boggles the mind. And that is in contrast to the randomness by which they were discarded and therefore often found today by construction workers or people digging old trash sites for bottles. And if you find one, it can make for a truly unique and unexpectedly valuable discovery!

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Bram Hepburn collects 19th-century New England bottles and glass, having spent the last 30 years digging and diving for bottles in New England and upstate New York. He lives in Eliot, Maine.

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

Almost any time I mention to someone that I dig for antique bottles, the first words out of their mouths is something along the lines of: “… you’re kidding! Well, as a matter of fact, one time we were digging a hole for a new water pipe behind our house and the back hoe started pulling up all these old bottles. We didn’t think much of it; we didn’t know they could actually be valuable! We just let them haul them all away in their dump truck. Wish we had known.”

Then they ask how to tell if a bottle is really old, and I try to give them a crash-course in dating old bottles or even bottle fragments they may come across. If the house was built before 1870 or so, there is almost assuredly at least one, and more likely many, old whole glass bottles either buried deep in the bottoms of what was 150 years ago an outhouse pit, a well or maybe a trash pit at the back corner of their yard. There can also be random dropped or tossed single bottles that were just “early American litter” that got covered by falling leaves one autumn and then the falling leaves and dust of the next 150 years, which left it protected in its natural cocoon, in the exact same condition it was when it was inadvertently left there.

When you dig and handle antique bottles for a few decades, you can’t help but develop an eye for old glass, and the ability to instantly identify even a small shard of glass as something common, and not so old, from something very special, hand-crafted by the earliest glass blowers in America.

Here in New England, some of the pioneers of utilitarian glass blowers were found in the towns of Stoddard and Keene, N.H., Coventry, Conn., and Sandwich, Mass. The rudimentary glass houses in these and other towns consisted of small log-built buildings with a furnace or kiln of some sort, and a source of water. If you find an old photo or sketch of these humble workshops, you’ll see scruffy men with dirty faces in ragged work clothes, with a couple of horses “parked” outside. They could not have thought, their wildest dreams, I’m sure, just how valuable and desired the simple wares they crafted each day would someday be. Like many people, I suppose, they were creating a long-lasting legacy just by what they did in their daily works. And they never even knew it.

A few of the early bottles they crafted are among the holy grail of antique bottle collectors. Even a tiny edge piece of one of these bottles has value to an avid collector. Not to say that you can generally go out and sell broken bottle pieces to anyone, but as a hobby, bottle collectors love to sit and sift through a box of old shards. They’ll go through each one, even tiny ones, and be able to name the bottle, its age, where it was made, what it contained, and its value on today’s market.

From the earliest free-blown American bottles of the late 18th century to the machine-made bottles that began to be produced after the Industrial Revolution, the manner in which the bottles lip was made give us urban archeologists a pretty clear timeline to go by. A bottle collector can identify a bottle using even a small broken piece of the lip, the way a “normal” person can identify their favorite candy bar by even a little piece of the corner of its colored wrapper.

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Bram Hepburn collects 19th-century New England bottles and glass, having spent the last 30 years digging and diving for bottles in New England and upstate New York. He lives in Eliot, Maine.

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

Yes, that headline is correct, and I’d love to be able to say I was the one who found it. I didn’t, but the next best thing is for a friend of mine to have dug it up. He did, and I was able to see it and hold it myself.

My friend, whose name I won’t mention here, found it in a location I also won’t mention here. But I can say that it was found deep in a muddy waterside trash dump and, for him, it was the thrill of a lifetime.

He had dug this site in years past, and found the base to one of these extremely rare “Stoddard Flag flasks” about 10 years ago. Then, a few years after that, after many more trips, he found a shard to a second one. He surmised that there had to be a whole one that survived somewhere down there, buried in the layers of muck. And it became an obsession.

And I can tell you from experience that it can be a lonesome quest, digging in deep mud, looking and feeling somewhat insane, not knowing or even expecting that you will find what you really after. So, when I got news that the impossible had happened, and that he had actually found a whole one, completely intact and in perfect condition, I was happy for my friend and I felt buoyed by his success, as I’m sure all bottle diggers and divers feel; knowing that there are still amazing treasures to be found out there, with just a little—OK, a lot—of resolve, persistence and some luck.

Admittedly, the bottle he finally uncovered is not the Holy Grail for all New England collectors. But it is not unreasonable to call it that for him. I know he considers it to be one.

It is pint size, standing a bit more than seven inches tall, with an open pontil scar base, and in a classic New England olive-amber coloration. One side of the flask is embossed “NEW GRANITE GLASS WORKS STODDARD NH” and the reverse is embossed with an amazing 13-star American flag.

It is a rare and valuable piece of Americana, and it had been lying deep in the mud for about 140 years.

It blown at the New Granite Glass Works in Stoddard, N.H., between 1861-71. Certainly, the form and overall presence of this flask makes it as something special, even to a casual collector or lover of history. But the collector value of this rarity ranges puts it a little pout of the range of the casual collector. It values between $12,000 and $20,000, depending on condition. A similar example of the flask sold late last year for more than $14,000.

Memories of a Great Find of My Own
One of my own greatest bottle digs happened 17 years ago, when my daughter Annie was born. I was giddy at the birth of my first child, and the day we brought her home from the hospital, my wife put her up in the bassinette and I decided to go for a bottle dig to burn off some energy.

There was a spot about 200 yards from my front door that I had driven by hundreds of time. It was right next to the road, and I figured that a couple of old buckets on the surface of the ground would have been inspected and dug through by some bottle digger decades ago.

Nonetheless, I informed my wife that I had to “go find Annie a bottle” and headed out the door.

In a few minutes I was digging carefully, slowly through the leaves and in to the humus and decaying tin cans. I heard my rake squeak on to some glass and brushed away the dirt to expose the words “STODDARD, N.H.”

It weird to try to describe how excited you feel when you uncover a rare piece like that, so you’ll just have to imagine. I presumed it would be a wonderful but broken bottle, and when I pulled it out, sparkling and in mint condition, I charged back to my van and sped home. I honked the horn as I came in the driveway, startling my wife inside the house.

She met me at the door as I stood on the steps outside, holding the bottle so that the words “STODDARD, N.H.” were facing her. She didn’t know its exact value, but she knew enough to know it was a great find! I had been gone for less than five minutes.

Its value is between $700 and $1,400. It is referred to as a “lettered Stoddard flask” and reads completely “Granite Glass Co. Stoddard, NH.” During the 1860s and ’70s, the early glass manufacturers in Stoddard, N.H., crafted some of the most highly sought-after American-made glass bottles.

“Who gave you that flask?” she asked skeptically.

“I just dug it for Annie,” I beamed.

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Bram Hepburn collects 19th-century New England bottles and glass, having spent the last 30-plus years digging and diving for bottles in New England and upstate New York. He lives in Eliot, Maine.

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth