“Henry T. Hellmers' Secret Batch Book of Glass Formulae”, by J. W. Courter.
This is a reprint of a book that is not widely known because the first printing about 10 years ago consisted of a grand total of 25 copies, all of which (I think) went to libraries and collectors. I stumbled across it at the Rakow Library at Corning shortly after that original publication and subsequently spent a couple of days photocopying the glass recipes in it. There are over 2300 of them! A huge number of those - like the ones pictured on the page posted below - are for colored glass.
As a reference book of glass formulations this book is pretty awesome. Henry Hellmers was a glass chemist who worked for a number of different American glass companies from about 1920 to 1960 and kept a recipe book that contains many of the recipes used by those companies, as well as many he collected from various other sources. There are a ton of color recipes in the book, many (most?) of which were actual recipes used in glass factory production from the late 1800's to the mid 1900's. Someone with a decent amount of glassmaking knowledge could easily adapt many of these for studio use. Even without doing that, it is a great resource just on the historical aspect of the recipes alone.
When I found out this book was being reprinted by the new publisher, I decided to make a quantity purchase so I could offer them at a discount to other people with an interest in glassmaking.
The publisher's list price for this book is $50. My selling price, which includes free Media Mail shipping to the USA, is $42.95. No international orders at the moment, but that could change if interest warrants. Payment is through Paypal only. There are a limited number of books available, but again, if interest warrants I will buy another batch of them to sell.
The images below are of a couple of the pages from the Hellmers book. All of the glass recipe pages have this layout - ingredients listed on the left, quantities of those ingredients in columns with each column representing one particular glass, and the origin of the recipe at the bottom of each column. As you can see, the pages pictured below are for transparent ruby glass recipes, one with six different selenium ruby recipes, all of which came from the Lancaster Lens Company in the 1920's and 30's, and the other with six gold ruby recipes of the Sandwich Glass Company, from the late 1800's. If you've always wanted to know what ingredients are in various types of colored glass, you will never find a better book than this.
Last - and very important - the ArtFire StrikingColor shop in which I have these listed is NOT the same one in which I sell the StrikingColor Glass I make, meaning it is NOT the link appearing under the StrikingColor logo at the bottom of this post. The storefront for the books is
here.
Brad
Glassmaking book - over 2300 glass recipes!!!
