Libbey Tumbler “Cities of the World” Glasses

I like to visit garage sales, and estate sales, and thrift stores, and a bunch of other sales. There are many things I like about these places/events, but one of my favorite is finding interesting things I never even knew existed, especially if I can use or display them in an interesting way.

I found one such set of things at an estate sale. I was generally looking around. There was a lot of stuff, but most of it I wasn’t interested in, though that’s sometimes a good thing because it makes me pay attention to find what I want. I was looking in the glassware, which is something I don’t usually do, and I saw a set of glasses with city names on them, and interesting graphics. I liked a few in particular, but I hate to split a set, so I bought them all.

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The glasses themselves were interesting, but I couldn’t figure out the theme. I soon started looking for them online. I can’t help but look for stories in what I buy. I can sometimes accept that a Chinese deck of cards has no story, but not glasses like these, even though in this case I could find no information. This is a problem I typically run into (and one I ran into more recently in reverse when I tried to find Chinese chess sets). I just don’t use the right words in my searches. And the glasses (or most items really) provided no information as to what they were.

In these cases I usually resort to Google image search and try to identify what I have visually. I finally came across a helpful blog post (Link) discovered they were Libbey Cities of the World series glasses, the tumbler version of sets that included “Old Fashioned” and goblet versions. But I was intrigued. I don’t like finding out a partial story, and the set of glasses I kept seeing had Havana in it, but my set has Nassau. I did more digging and discovered that the “theme” of the glasses was the world’s fair, but that’s pretty loose, and I ended up digging back through 50’s back issues of the Libbey catalogue (fortunately available online from the company) to find when they came out. I found out the year they came out (I’ve forgotten now: great article, Austin!) and that they did indeed originally have Havana on all three sets of glassware.

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Eventually, after more digging, and even more (I’m bad at using the internet, so things like this take me a long time) I found that the glass sets waned in popularity late in the 50’s and early 60’s. The non-tumbler versions were discontinued and when the Cuban revolution happened, and Havana was bad press, they replaced the city (with a comparable one). So my set is a “complete” set of the rarer version of a fairly rare set of glassware (really only rare because glasses tend to break). I’ve seen a couple photos of “complete” collections of the early lines, but they don’t have Nassau, and that makes me feel quite special. To have a really complete set of 8, you need 9, but that would make display a little awkward.

So, from one purchase I had an afternoon’s worth of fun sorting through the internet, and I had a fairly unique set of glasses, and now I have an article. I do plan on using the glasses, though not heavily, or at parties like I read online some people did (I couldn’t stand it if they got broken, especially by someone who isn’t me). Not that I won’t let people use them, glasses are meant to be used, just not these ones at parties. And they’ll make a great conversation piece. Hopefully I don’t hear too many opinions about the Cuban revolution because of them. I’d also love to get the full set with Havana, and the other two styles at some point. I guess I’ll just have to keep my eyes peeled. I might even write a little update.