Antique 1910s Glattolin Wax Collar Remedy 🥫 To Improve Temper Unopened Box

Could a Collar Wax Improve Your Temper? 🥫 Antique 1910s Glattolin Box, Unopened

Size: 1 1/2" x 3/4" Box ~ Unopened New Old Stock.

Every one here is still sealed shut.

🧴 What's In The Box

Inside the wrapper - not that I'm suggesting you break it, the whole appeal here is that nobody has - sits a small cream wax block with a cross-shaped notch cut into it, next to a folded orange leaflet. The box itself was printed for more than one market at once: "Glattolin," "Trade Mark. Registered.," "Made in Germany" on one face, and right around the corner, "Glettoline," "Marque Deposee," "Importe d'Allemagne," for buyers across the border in France. A third face reads "Glattolina," and a fourth "Glaettolin" - four spellings of the same name on one small box. The picture faces carry the trademark - a compass and dividers inside a circle - and a mustached gentleman working a stiff collar between his hands, and the leaflet's own drawing of the box boasts "Patented in All Countries."

📜 The Leaflet Talks Big

This is the part I love about these. The leaflet is printed in English and it does not undersell itself: "Glattolin makes the edges of your collars and cuffs feel like velvet and saves your temper," it announces, and it's "a boon to all with short necks as it allows them to wear high collars without the slightest inconvenience or fear of irritation from chafing." The directions are refreshingly plain: "Rub the edges of the collar with the notch in the block and it will instantly become perfectly smooth." And in case you had doubts: "Absolutely Stainless!"

Glattolin didn't travel the leaflet alone. The same sheet advertises two stablemates from the same line: "Purifin," an antiseptic sold as "Best after Shaving" and "far superior to the usual Alum preparation," and "Cutoline" styptic pencils, which will "instantly stop any kind of bleeding." A whole little medicine cabinet of Edwardian grooming, printed on one sheet of orange paper.

🎩 Why Anyone Needed Wax For Their Collar

This only makes sense once you remember what a collar was at the time: not part of the shirt, but a separate, heavily starched piece of laundry you buttoned on fresh every day. The detachable collar itself started in Troy, New York - Hannah Montague cut the collar off her husband's shirt in 1827 so she'd only have to wash the collar instead of the whole thing, and the idea grew into an industry that made Troy "the Collar City." Starching gave those collars what one history calls a "hard cardboard-like consistency" - exactly the kind of edge that would saw at your neck by the end of a long day. Glattolin was sold straight at that problem.

H. G. Wells knew the feeling. In "Kipps," his shop-clerk hero treats himself to a set of smart new collars, "nearly three inches high," and they promptly "made his neck quite sore and left a red mark under his ears." A whole little industry like this one existed because of fellows like Kipps.

📦 One Box, Five, Or The Whole Display

This listing covers three ways to bring one home: a single unopened box, a set of five unopened boxes, or the full countertop display - the kind a shop kept by the register - a dozen boxes, each in its printed paper wrapper. The display carries its own printing: "Glattolin / Prevents Collars Chafing the Neck. / Made in Germany," and the lid notes "Form and manner of this package registered." Whichever you pick, what's inside is the same little box, wax block, and leaflet described above - unopened, every one of them.

🕰️ No Maker's Name, No Exact Date

Nobody's name is printed on this box - just the Glattolin trademark, registered but unsigned. There's no date on it either. Dealers who handle these place them in the 1910s, which fits everything else here: the stiff, starched collar was already an institution by then. One more footnote, since collectors like these things: the name "Cutoline" still turns up today on styptic pencils made in Portugal - same name, a different era, not the same company as this one.