I have yet to find a suitable replacement for the old “glasschat” forum that, sadly, became a target for spammers and then failed to be supported in the wake of programming language updates, rendering it inoperable. I pulled it down and it has stayed down for some time now.
Since the collecting community is small, maybe there is no need for such a forum, but the upshot is that I now get many emails from visitors to the site, mostly from non-collectors (see the last post below for an example), but I’ll try to address the collector-related queries here.
I’ve had a handful of emails asking if I’m selling my collection. The short answer is “no”, although I’ve added a large number of glasses to the sales pages in recent months, so it may certainly seem that way.
During the past 5 years, I’ve been involved with several intense work-related projects that left me with little in the way of free time to devote to the site or the hobby. That meant that large numbers of glasses were coming in from collections, individuals wanting to sell, eBay buys etc. but were not getting processed (washing, photographing, logging, entering into the database), to the point where I had around 500 glasses waiting in line. The backlog extends back to 2015-2016, although some have been lingering since the previous decade.
I’ve finally had a chance to work though the pile recently, so all of the duplicates and upgrades are making their way online. Most of the common white-etched glasses have now been processed and have been logged. Next, I’ll work through the many colored-label glasses, the embossed/debossed glasses, the metal shots, and the lugs, all of which require a different camera and lighting set up – which is why they’ve had to wait patiently.