The pre-pro Project:
A Vision for the Future of www.pre-pro.com

This site tries to serve many purposes - to provide a gathering place for like-minded individuals, to educate, to entertain, and to celebrate the artistry and sheer joy that owning these glasses can bring. Only you can decide how well these goals are met.   

But the site also has a very serious side.   The glasses are relics from a time past and we've made a conscious effort to try and provide a sense of their history.  Each glass listing in the shot database comes with a brief summary of what we know about its origins.  We've also provided databases to help you research the history of your own unlisted glasses.  Populating these databases has required considerable time and effort but the potential payoffs in terms of enhancing the pleasure and satisfaction in collecting these glasses is tremendous.

But one doesn't have to dig too far into glass history before realizing that shot glasses are only a tiny part of a much larger story of the distillers, wholesalers and saloon owners who made a living selling liquor in pre-Prohibition times.  Shot glasses - I really hate to say it - were indeed "go-withs", just one more vehicle for advertising The Main Product. Indeed, many shot-glass collectors also have stupendous bottle, decanter and jug (to name just a few pre-pro items) collections that paint a broader picture of the industry. Take a look at Howard Currier's story on Ed Sipos, for example, or Rich Lucchesi's mini-web within pre-pro..    

Before you start to panic at the thought of what might be coming next ("he's going to turn it into a bottle site - oh no...."), www.pre-pro.com will remain FOR ALL TIME a SHOT-GLASS website! You'll always find a home page stuffed with shots and "Shot of the Week": "Bottle of the Week" just wouldn't be the same!  

But building online databases does present a remarkable opportunity to create something bigger and more significant than a simple glass-collector's website. It could also give bottle collectors a chance to showcase their precious flasks and shoo-flies alongside their shots, Don't worry, the purist shot collectors will never have to see them if they don't wish to. I'll call this vision of what might be "The pre-Pro Project" for now.

So that you might understand what it is I'm talking about, I put together a mockup centering on just a single liquor dealer.  The mock-up is something like an architect's sketch of how a building might look when completed.  It consists of a series of static web pages that are linked together so show relationships, but once The Project is implemented, the pages will be created on demand before your eyes using a template and information pulled from a central database.  The database is named "midacore" - a nod to George Mida.   Mida created a  register of the old whiskey brands and his legacy has proved to be a corner stone upon which our research is built. 

So you can understand how The Project will work when implemented, you're lead into the mockup via a shot glass listing page.   The page is almost identical to the one you're already familiar with, except it has three additions.  

• The first is a panel of thumbnails showing all of the known glasses from this merchant. Clicking on the thumbnails takes you to the relevant listing page for each glass.  
• Secondly, there is a hyperlink at the end of the notes section (labeled "More on Humphrey & Martin")  that takes you to a page  that collates everything known about the merchant - this page is what The Project is all about (see below)
• Third, there is a text box at the bottom of the page that allows you to send in comments without having to write an e-mail.  Every page will come with a comment box.  Because implementing The Project creates so many inadvertent errors and typos (and will create many more), I needed an easy way for you to tell me about them,  PLUS, you can use it for sending me any ideas on changing the way a page looks, the information it contains - or if you know something about the company that might be added to the database.  Try it!  It's easy to use!

The merchant info page takes information from many sources and draws them together.  The history section is created from the old City Database, showing where the merchant was located, when they appeared in directories (year by year), what type of business they were etc etc.  If I can find an example of their billhead and trademarks, I'll include them as a header.  Below the history section are panels of thumbnails corresponding to shots - but also bottles, jugs, corkscrews, and other relics from the company's past.  Clicking on thumbnails of bottles and jugs will take you to bottle and jug listing pages.  The demo's are preliminary and will probably change in their look and style in time.  There are no bottle and jugs databases yet and they'll only get created if collectors send me photos and information.  Take a look.  See what you think.  Use the comment boxes to tell me if you think this is workable, useful, a waste of time.  Your input is important and will shape the way The Project develops.

Implementing The Project  will thus involve a behind-the-scenes transition from a series of static databases to a single, dynamic, and interactive database  that collectors themselves can edit without requiring a PhD in html. It will incorporate everything and anything pre-pro. Assuming that I can pull this off (I'm having to become familiar with three different computer programming disciplines, so chances are slim), most of you will never notice any changes, although there may be an occasional hiccup when you try and pull up a glass listing page.

I hope you'll bear with me. This will take a year to implement and a lifetime or two to complete (you can see how the conversion  is progressing on the next page), but it WILL be worth it, I promise.

So start cataloging your glasses! You won't want to miss out being a part of this!