Bill Thomas, looking over the crowd Sunday as it streams into the 19th annual Baltimore Bottle Show at Essex Community College, may be thinking sugar bowls.
You don't have to be an expert on early American glass to tell a bottle from a bowl, and Thomas knows his years-long quest for the precise piece he covets is unlikely to end in triumph in those surroundings.
"But you watch," says Jim Choplick, president of the show's sponsor, the Baltimore Antique Bottle Club. "Bill will end the day closer to his goal -- that three-piece mold at a reasonable price."
In the days of online auctions, a good old-fashioned show of wares may seem obsolete.
But Choplick maintains its importance to the serious collector.
"When dealers and collectors are together in one hall, it beats any electronic system," he says. "Trust builds. More people than ever will go away knowing what Bill's looking for. And one or two of them just may have told him where there's a sugar bowl he didn't know about, a bowl he can talk about to its present owner."
Nominally, sellers differ from buyers. At the Baltimore show, which has come to be the East Coast's largest indoor old-bottle event, some 200 dealers, including Thomas, spread out their wares for nearly 2,000 collectors.
Rick Lease, Sunday's show chairman, says there's a strategy to on-the-spot dealing.
"I'd guess that in some respect -- historical flasks, sodas, bitters, gins, beers, whiskeys, figurals, patent medicines, milks, inkwells, nursers, whimsies and so on -- a majority aren't showing their best stuff," he says. "Talk to them without being a pest, establish yourself, and you may find where their heartbeat is."
Even among dealers, Thomas, 57, from Abingdon in Harford County, is a minor celebrity. He is also impresario and tour leader, the vice president of Baltimore's bottle club and the founder and current president of the Baltimore Glass Club. He organizes and manages 15 Baltimore shows a year -- antiques, collectibles, old advertising -- with his wife Jo as principal assistant (their young son Seth is already a collector). In between, Thomas and his Holiday Productions have led 34 collector/buyer expeditions to the major trade shows in England and on the continent.
He, too, is convinced that virtual trading isn't a replacement for hands-on inspection.
"Some people, seeing the volume of [online] auction bids, are gloomy for the future of the regional or national show, in bottles and many other categories," he says. "What people should notice is the fraction of home-bid action that is about collectibles -- huge -- and how small is the fraction of stuff offered that is truly old and good.
"Before making up their minds," adds Thomas, who says he is active on the Internet, "sensible collectors still like to touch that object, hold it up to the light, inspect it for flaws and repairs -- and maybe discover they know its value better than the dealer does."
Thomas himself, you have to catch on the wing. Saturday, for instance, he'll be at Timonium Fairgrounds, running one more ad show. Monday, the day after Essex, he and his 35th travel group are off to the late-winter shows in the United Kingdom.
If, somewhere, it turns out there's a sugar bowl from Sandwich or Boston, which a glassblower formed in his mold toward 1830, and its present owner might take less than, say, $2,500, the deal may have to wait a few days. But the sensible collector/dealer/organizer/officer is also a patient fellow.
Bottle show
When: Sunday, 8 a.m.-3 p.m.
Where: Essex Community College Athletic Center, 7201 Rossville Blvd.
Pub Date: 3/05/99