Historic Bottle Research Bibliography (Lindsey/BLM/SHA)

The References page of the Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information Website — created by Bill Lindsey (Bureau of Land Management, retired; hosted in association with the Society for Historical Archaeology) — is the field’s de facto master bibliography for the dating and typology of American bottles made ca. 1800–1950s. The full page (~300 book entries plus internet-site and periodical sections, site revision 2022-12-05) is the map of what in it matters for Three Rivers Glass research.

What it is and how it’s organized

Three hyperlinked sections: Reference Books (alphabetical by author, with works the author deems essential highlighted), Internet Reference Sites, and Periodical & Journal Articles. The listing deliberately prioritizes historical content over price guides; most works are out of print. Several early glassmaker catalogs are noted as available through the Corning Museum of Glass Rakow Research Library.

Entries this expert already relies on

• Lockhart, Bill — the bibliography’s single most-cited researcher (441 mentions in the raw capture). His SHA-hosted Encyclopedia of Manufacturers Marks corpus includes “2019gg. Three Rivers Glass Co.” — the BRG chapter that anchors this collection’s maker’s-marks work — and the El Paso/Alamogordo bottler chapters behind the customer roster [ev-0042].
• Brantley, William F. 1975. A Collector’s Guide to Ball Jars (Muncie, IN) — the source of the “1939” position in the closure timeline dispute, which BRG judges “most likely correct.”
• Toulouse, Julian Harrison — foundational marks researcher; his rejected “1947” closure date figures in the same dispute.

Acquisition candidates surfaced by the bibliography

Entries not yet in this collection that bear directly on open questions:

• Birmingham, Frederick A. 1980. Ball Corporation: The First Century (Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis) — a corporate-side account of Ball Brothers that could speak to the foreclosure era from the acquirer’s perspective.
• Lief, Alfred 1965. A Close Look at Closures — cited as one of the best closure references; relevant to the vacuum-closure half of the Crystalvac question.
• Davis, Pearce 1949. The Development of the American Glass Industry (Harvard) — industry-wide context for the Hartford-Empire licensing system and Depression-era shakeout.

Cautions

The bibliography is a collector-literature map, not an endorsement chain: many listed works copy each other (the echo-chamber problem), and price-guide-era books vary widely in rigor. Use it to locate works, then apply this expert’s usual independence checks before treating any as corroboration.