As you can see from the stats above, recent weeks have seen a slew of choice pre-pro glasses selling on eBay, with more than thirty rising above the $100 mark. These auctions have kept the average sales much higher than normal for this time of year. All this activity reflects a handful of collectors unloading shots to take advantage of the high demand for rare glass, including bluroc, thegenuineflask, and lakerdude33. The latest addition to the seller force is hottshots, who is better known to eBay oldtimers as junkmoney. Check the archives to learn about the path of slaughter he routinely left through unfortunate bidder ranks ten years ago!

Since we're now firmly into the eBay late-spring-early-summer doldrums, it'll be interesting to see if the sales prices remain high even as the eyeball count drops during coming months.

You may recall that back in January of this year, another suspect glass showed up on eBay. The seller was located in Dallas, TX, and reported having picked it up in a local antique mall. The glass appeared to be heavier than the usual thin-walled shots, and the label is clumsy and acid-etched. This raised the question of whether it was a genuine pre-pro glass or a recent creation designed to fool unsuspecting buyers.

 

In the interests of glass science (or something), the Poobah acquired the glass for further inspection. Turns out to be pig of a glass to photograph because the label is so thin - I'm not sure that I did any better than the seller with his photo above.

The glass is NOT your standard thin-wall; it's a little heavier. But I do have other examples of such glasses in my collection that are clearly pre-pro, so the weight issue in and of itself does not make the What's It a fake. The label is clearly acid-etched, which makes it either an early glass or a very recent creation, which is why I'm always a little leery of such glasses. What bothers me most is that the image of the lady in her fancy dress and the table with a wine glass look like something that could be a stock image. Plus the text is crude, with the letters in PURE RYE varying in width and weight. I suppose it could have been created by an inexperienced etcher working in the pre-pro years but, for now, the jury is still out and awaiting a similarly-labelled bottle that might provide reassurance of authenticity.

In the interests of trying to maintain a regular SOTW, I'm going to keep things short. There's been so many stellar glasses selling recently that we really are spoilt for choice, but the glass below is the one that caught the Poobah's eye as being known to exist but that had yet to make an appearance on eBay. It's a Stag Whiskey, from Eising of New York. Many of you will be familiar with the similarly-designed glass from a later pre-pro period (see the database), but the example below was created by George Truog. We know this because his original working sketch appears in his scrap book.

It's nice to see that one of these glasses has survived, meaning that there's probably more out there.....