Search the Community

PICTURES HAVE BEEN UPDATED - LATER PAGES relating to the origin of the akkerman bottle, here are a few predecessors of the akkerman bottle, made by the dutch firm of gimborn. this inkbottle is the very first "longneck-bottle" or langhalsfles although this bottle doesn`t use the marble in the neck yet. this bottle is extremely rare, I know of 2 in a museum and a third I`ve dug up in a bottledump in the netherlands, which I traded with a former employe of Gimborn. the second model of the "longneck-bottle" are these ones, in two sizes "the baby-longneck" and the "longneck" to my knowledge, these bottles preceed the waterman bottle of similar design. these bottles are the third type of "longneck-bottle" and are similar to the ones produced by Akkerman today. only the size differs slightly, the Akkerman bottles are slightly smaller. this third type of langhalsfles or "longneck-bottle" later came with a different type of cap, made of yellow bakelite which was more prone to leaking.

The firm of Gimborn started in the Netherlands in 1902 in `s Heerenberg. I have a cataloque of the `s Heerenberg period. Gimborn moved to Zevenaar,Holland in 1904/1905. (Holland is often used as another name for the Netherlands) So the cataloque from `s Heerenberg must be from the years 1902-1904. In this cataloque several different inktbottles are named. So we start with one of the oldest inktbottles used by Gimborn, the penlayer No 40. This is a round bottle with on both sides of the neck, an indentation to lay a pen. This bottle disappeared from the cataloques in 1939. It was used for normal writing-ink and copying-ink. It is only known with a cork, never with a bakelite cap. Below are the labels used on these inktbottles. Note that on the first 2 labels (the yellow one and the pink one ) the small figure pouring ink over the globe is called a titan, used from 1925. Before 1925 a small devil was used as can be seen on the green and blue labels. It`s content was 45 grammes.

Last winter I wrote an article about the Gimborn firm. It was published in the journal of the Writers Equipment Society this spring. You can find the article here. I hope you'll appreciate it. Allard Borst.