An Interesting Unknown Shaker

 Bob & Carole Bruce

 Have you ever looked in your shaker collection and thought how nice a shaker would look in another color?  Especially some of the milk white shakers. You ask why they did not make that shaker in cranberry, cased blue or your favorite color.  We do find that sometimes it was made in a color but we have just not seen it. Well, that just happened to us … or so we thought.

We saw a shaker for sale on the Internet that we thought we recognized. But this one was in ruby and we only had it in milk white. Researching the books, we could not find it in the Lechner series. Carole remembered it was in Peterson’s book.  He had named it “Scroll, Top and Bottom”. When we received the shaker, we realized that we had not compared it very closely to the picture in the book. The ruby shaker was shorter and had no footed base. Of course, shorter was not easy to tell from the pictures but we should have noticed the footed base.

 Scroll, Top & Bottom              Ruby Unknown

 Further comparisons revealed more questions. How could two shakers have what appeared to be identical scroll designs but yet be a different shaker?  Oh, this must be another of the cases where they retooled the mold.  We chuckled to ourselves thinking that they had gotten smart and did what we thought that they should do more often.  But the opalware shaker was larger than the ruby shaker so that could not be the case.  We then concentrated on some other differences. There are some characteristics that tend to date the age of the shaker.  Some seem to make it early and some seem to make it later.  That is why we decided to tell this story in hope that someone might shed some light on it.

 As we were writing this article to explain the differences an exciting thought came to mind. We were thinking that the ruby shaker was possible a later shaker, even later than the Victorian era, probably into the Depression era or later. You may have guessed it by now, but the opalware shaker is from a retooled mold of the ruby shaker! 

As is always the case, the larger shaker results from a retooled mold as the mold is cut deeper making the molded piece larger.  In this case, the body of the shaker remains the same. A foot is added and the top is made larger. Thus, this indicated that the ruby shaker is an early shaker. It has not been identified to our knowledge so it appears to be an exciting rarity. The opalware shaker would also have to be considered rare as it escaped the Lechner books.

 From the picture you can see that the writing of the etching on the shaker looks to be Victorian era script writing. The top cover, which appears to be original, has celluloid insert more typical of the early Victorian era.  But what gave us concern at first, and still remains puzzling is the way the shaker was made. The shaker is clearly mold blown.  The top appears to be pressed. But close inspection of the top shows that the top looks like is was a pressed shaker. Where was the blowpipe attached to the shaker? Most (all?) of our mold blown shakers have a rough top where they were broken off the blowpipe and not finished.  Only pressed shakers have a molded top.  There is a very thin ridge on the inside surface of the top. Further confusion, is the coloring at the top. Early ruby shakers we have looked at carefully are ruby all of the way to the top.  The very tip of this one is amber! Some of the later ruby shakers we have seen are amber near the top. We assume this color change is a result of the heat variation and chemical composition differences, from the Victorian era to a later era, as the shaker is made. Another, not so significant observation, is that the threads on the shaker for the top are very narrow. This is also seldom, if ever, seen on early shaker. These characteristics are what made us initially think it could be a later shaker.

 The questions remain. Are the conclusions correct or is there something incorrect in our observations? Did a small innovative company that was ahead of the rest of the makers make the ruby shaker? Was the process they developed too expensive so that they went to the conventional way of making the top? Where are the ruby shakers in Scroll, Top and Bottom? Is this another case where we are trying to figure out what the ingenious designers of the time were doing, only to be way off base?

 We would certainly welcome any thoughts, ideas or knowledge about this unique shaker, whether it is in agreement with our findings or not.