ORANGE CRUSH soda bottle cap PROOF Mattson Bottling Works Hancock Michigan

Description

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ORANGE CRUSH soda bottle cap PROOF Mattson Bottling Works Hancock Michigan
WHAT IS A
CROWN PROOF
?
After bottlers send their design, text, and color choices that they want printed onto bottle crowns, the factory will send them an actual print on tin plate to show to the bottler, as a sample for approval. These flat samples can easily be mailed in an envelope.
Some crown makers, such as Hutchinson [
wHs
], simply hand-cut the proofs off of a printed sheet of steel, using tin snips. Others punch them perfectly round, just like a normal bottle cap before it is formed.
Crown Cork & Seal, however, went to the trouble of punching the proofs round, with four little tabs. The tabs were designed to fit into little slits in a card which held also all the information about the proposed crown cap. The bottler would then return the card and its proof, approving the sample or instructing changes.
These proofs are truly very rare because:
-
Only a very few examples of each proposed design were produced. Possibly only two, probably not more than four samples each.
-
They were nearly always returned to the crown factory, so even the bottlers hardly ever retained possession of them.
-
Designs were often changed and updated, at which time the factory would discard the older proofs, or they would be discarded
en masse
after a certain period of time
.
The proofs look larger than a bottle cap because the rim hasn’t yet been bent down and crimped to become the skirt, same as when the caps are formed from the punched sheet.
I am offering many proofs whose designs-brands-flavors are not known to have any existing specimens as an actual bottle cap. All CCS proofs that I offer have the four tabs, but some may have been bent over to the back of the disc.
These are all from the 1950s and the crowns would have had cork liners.