Mold Variations 

Mold variations have always been a keen topic of interest for me over the years. In the days of custom hand crafted molds, bottlers specified different mold styles to differentiate between product lines or introduce a new "look" to their bottles.  Often, as matter of economics, a bottler will choose to have his name and address "slug plated" into a standard mold, while some of his production line was being filled in "private molded" bottles. Sometimes, there are more subtle, perhaps unintentional, variations that even experienced collectors may miss.

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There is no better example of these subtle mold variations than the one illustrated above. Upon close examination you will see a slight difference in the size, shape and placement of the embossed letters. Clearly, there was no directive to create a different mold here. In fact, it looks like someone did their best to re-create the same mold. Perhaps the original mold cracked or wore out, or perhaps it was lost or stolen--in which case the glasshouse would simply do their best to re-make the original. Perhaps a competing glasshouse received an order to produce the "same" bottle at a lower cost, and did so. But which mold was first ? and . . . which mold is rarer ? After all, one mold may have had a production run of two years, whereas the other could have been run only two months.