Cocktail/Bar Book Library and some questions.

I recently discovered this online Library the other day: https://www.collectif1806.com/library/

It's a collection of over 200 Cocktail/Bar Guides dating back to the 1800s. They have scanned them in as searchable text. It's pretty nifty, lets say you want an Egg Nogg recipe, you can search these, and you get over 80 books with multiple Egg Nogg recipes. Some of these books are pretty hard to find, and like rare vintage Razors, when they do come up they are either overpriced or tons of people are all over trying to buy them. So it's cool that they have made them available to everyone. The only thing missing is the old book smell.

So in the earlier ones the unit of measure: "do." and later "ditto" is used, I'm assuming they are both the same unit of measurement, but how do they equate to ounces today?

Also you see "Wine Glass", "Pony Glass", and "Jigger" used as units. What were the standard sizes back at the turn of the century? Ten, and Five ounces?

Here is the main site where they have more pictures/info/and recipes...: https://www.collectif1806.com/

 

very cool,thank you for posting it .i can see a vintage cocktail and a shave..

 

Sure thing. I have a few of these. Great references, but having them on digits will make it much quicker to find things...

 

Thanks. Was just figuring that out reading though more. I guess it was easier for them to load a pre-made block for "do." or "ditto" rather than re-loading more letters, back in the print press days...

 

Just guessing, but maybe it was a resource thing back in the day of hand-set type... more "d"s and "o"s available than quote marks. "Di" might have been thought confusing as an abbreviation, at least in recipes, given that it's also a prefix meaning "two."