Foreword: Figural bottles, particularly in glass have always held a certain fascination for the general public and collectors alike. Some whiskey men today are remembered specifically for the shape of the containers they employed to hold their liquor. Three of the most notable among them are featured here.
Like many others, I have been fascinated by the wide array of colors, shades and shapes of bottles that bear the name A.M. Bininger, as well as the elaborate and multi-colored labels employed by this liquor firm for their whiskeys and other alcoholic products. The Bininger family company had a long history, beginning with the patriarch, Abraham Bininger who in 1778 opened a small grocery store in New York City. 
After Adam’s death in 1836 his family carried on the business under his name, expanding its trade to include liquors and wines. The names under which their whiskey and gin were sold included “Day Dream,” “Regulator,” “Peep O’Day,” “Night Cap,” “Traveler’s Guide,” and “Knickerbocker,” They were selling alcohol at a time when glass-manufacturing technology had made individualized private molds within practicality.
This made it possible for the Biningers to issue a wide variety of bottle shapes including barrels, urns, cannons, and clocks, all embossed with their 19 Broad St. address. Bininger labels also were unusual. Colorfully printed with advanced chromo lithographic techniques, the paper labels gave the public cherubs, soldiers, buckskinned pioneers, fruit baskets, pastoral scenes and frolicking children.
As Don Denzin has written: “Happily for collectors of American glass, the legacy left by A. M. Bininger & Co. is a special one. The bottles, unrivaled at the time for imaginative form, set a standard for later package design which has seldom been matched. Collectors can only imagine what “Night Cap,” or “Day Dreams,” “Old Times Family Rye,” or ”Knickerbocker” must have tasted like. They can, however, still appreciate the company’s bottles and appreciate fully the creativity and craftsmanship which make Bininger glass unique.”
Edmund G. Booz was a Philadelphia distiller of the mid-19th Century, who conceived and issued distinctive log cabin bottles and thereby etched his name in whiskey history and into the hearts of fervent bottle collectors. Booz sold his whiskey from a storefront at 120 Walnut Street to liquor merchants and tavern owners throughout the Delaware Valley. 
The Whitney Glass Works in Glassboro, New Jersey had a retail office in Philadelphia adjacent to Booz at 118 Walnut. It was one of the largest and most accomplished glass and bottle manufacturers in America. We can imagine Edmund walking next door with an idea for a whiskey bottle and being warmly received. Nevertheless, Booz’s log cabin must have posed challenges. The bottle with its squared edges and embossed windows, doors, roof shingles and writing on many sides, would have required great skill from the workers. It was difficult to blow sufficient glass into the corners and crevasses of Booz’s containers. Examples often are found with damage because of the thinness of the glass at those points.
The key to the bottles being at all feasible was a mold hinged to open and close diagonally. A treadle mold was used applying foot power to allowed the master blower to close the mold around the blob of glass as he was blowing into it and then allowed him to open the mold carefully as he was finished making the bottle. Excess glass was then cracked off and the top applied. The original bottle also had a paper label wrapper, one that depicted an early American cabin.
The Whitney Glass works appears to have produced these bottles for as many as 12 years, reputedly into the 1870s. As a result, although reasonably rare, many versions fetch under $10,000. Over the years Booz bottles have been reproduced by other glass houses, however, and collectors must be aware of the differences in the later versions that are valued much less highly.
Born in 1838, William “Billy” Foust at age 22 took over a distilling operation that his father had begun in 1840 at the family farm near the small town of Glen Rock in York County, Pennsylvania. Foust rebuilt his father’s still, constructed a six-story warehouse and added other ancillary buildings. He also greatly increased production.
Foust rapidly became known for his highly imaginative way of packaging his liquor. An estimated fifteen different figural glass and ceramic bottles were issued by the York County distillery. In addition to a realistic yellow banana, they included a salt-covered pretzel, a ceramic ear of corn, a partially peeled sweet potato and a glass billy club. Other figurals attributed to Foust are a roast turkey, cigar, ham bone, clam shells, fish, pig and horn of plenty.
By 1907 under Foust’s leadership production was up to 3,000 barrels of whiskey a year. A small brick and stone village grew up around the spring-fed hollow that was the site of the distillery. The town had housing for the employees, a railroad station, a town square with a water fountain, as well as telephone service -- rare for a rural location. The location became known as Foustown. Eventually the distillery grew to include a bonded warehouse and a “bottled in bond” bottling facility. To facilitate the transport of his whiskey by rail Billy also maintained an office in downtown Glen Rock.
Through the years Foust’s figurals have sparked enthusiasm from collectors. Unfortunately only a few, like the oyster shown here, clearly can be identified as Billy’s whimseys. Because of reproductions on the market buyers must take every precaution to validate authenticity.
Note: Each of these three whiskey men have been profiled in earlier posts on this website: A.M. Bininger, July 4, 2014; Edmund Booz, July 27, 2015; and Billy Foust, June 9, 2011.
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