Arne Ljung

Arne Ljung (1913-1998) was one of the first representatives of the handmade pipe tradition in postwar Sweden. He spent most of his adult life in the business world, serving as general manager of an automobile company. A serious illness diagnosed in the 1960s led him to leave this position; records indicate that around 1963, as a man past fifty, he turned the hobby he had pursued for years into a livelihood.

A Late-Starting Bench

What makes Ljung's story unusual is not only the age at which he entered the trade but the circumstances behind it. His illness lasted more than thirty years, but according to accounts it left the master too weak to work only in his final year. In other words, the bench operated without interruption for thirty years after the diagnosis. Throughout this long period, production was carried on single-handedly and at small scale; there was no staff working alongside Ljung, nor a workshop carrying his name forward.

In the Sweden of the time, there was almost no pipe maker working under his own name; production in the country lay largely in the hands of factory operations such as Svenska Rökpipfabriken. Ljung states in his own promotional texts that he was Sweden's only pipe maker and the first to offer hobby-level pipe-making lessons. These courses are said to have been held in Limhamn, near Malmö. Ljung is thus regarded as a starting point who paved the way for the later generation of Swedish masters, such as Bo Nordh.

Production and Circulation

Ljung's pipes were produced from briar blocks, in limited numbers and shaped by hand. His total output never approached factory scale, which is why examples are rarely encountered today. Descriptions of surviving examples note that the pipes carry a stamp giving the maker's name and country of manufacture; the exact reading of the stamp has not been confirmed by an independent source.

Because most of the output was exported, few examples remain in Sweden. Most of the master's pipes are reported to have gone to Japan; this country, where the handmade pipe was regarded as an art object, was in those same years also the chief export market for masters of the Danish School. Judging by his own promotional text, Ljung's work also found an audience in Continental Europe and the United States.

Recognition

Ljung's own promotional text notes that his pipes appeared in an exhibition on art and crafts held by the Swedish Society of Industrial Design. This is an early example of pipe making being considered an applied art in Sweden at the time.

Arne Ljung died in 1998 at the age of eighty-five; his name did not pass to a brand or successor. What he left behind is small in number, but is remembered as the starting point of individual pipe craftsmanship carried on outside the factory in Sweden.