By Ben Marks — Lots of people collect milk bottles, even more collect milk glass, and among the legions who collect vintage signs, there’s an enthusiastic subset of individuals who gravitate to anything made of porcelain or tin bearing the name of a local dairy or the cartoon likeness of that supreme milk mascot, Elsie the Cow. "Milkmaids carried more than 100 pounds around their necks, several miles, every day." Ian Spellerberg is not one of those people, but he is seriously interested in antique and...

Bill Lindsey on How To Read a Bottle

By Maribeth Keane — My maternal grandfather and uncle got into bottles in about 1965 or ‘66 when I was in high school, and we started digging. My uncle was in Arizona, near some of the old mining camps there. Those were the glory days of bottle digging. People had access with four-wheel drive vehicles and gas was cheap and time-off was more abundant. Then years passed and people started really hitting the ghost towns and mining camps and logging camps of the West. Anyway, we started by digging some of the...