A.A.C. Hedges served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War as a seaman aboard HMS Newark. He became Borough Librarian of Fleetwood, and from 1946 until his retirement in 1974 was Borough Librarian and Curator at Great Yarmouth. He became interested in bottles and in collecting them at a time when the hobby was new, and this book records his research and enthusiasm.

While the prices of most antiques have soared in recent decades, rising well beyond the price-range of the average person, bottles have remained comparatively inexpensive. In Victorian times, our forebears packed everything from tea to hair-restorer in glass bottles that were discarded with general household refuse - with the result that, in rubbish dumps all over Britain, these bottles are waiting to be dug up, each non-machine-made bottle a collector's item that affords the collector a rare opportunity to unearth and restore their own collection. This book describes the development of bottles of all sorts and illustrates over two hundred examples.