Arthur Leonard (Leonard's Pipe Shop)

Arthur Leonard was the proprietor who opened his eponymous tobacco shop in Portland, in the American state of Oregon, in 1936. Known to locals simply as Leonard's, the shop never achieved the fame of the great East Coast names in American pipe retailing; it nonetheless carved out a distinctive place for itself in pipe collecting. What earned it that place was not so much what sat in its display case as the direct ties the business built with manufacturers.

A Relationship Built with Suppliers

From the shop's earliest years, Leonard chose to deal personally with the great pipe houses of the day. Its shelves and stock ledgers carried names such as Charatan, Barling, Sasieni, Kaywoodie, and Comoy's. The tangible result of this relationship was a run of pieces both large and unusual, well beyond the reach of an ordinary shop: outsized late-1930s Kaywoodies, huge-chambered models evidently made to special order, and unsmoked Dunhill Magnums held for years in their original boxes.

By all accounts, one of the shop's most notable orders was placed with Charatan. In the 1950s and 1960s, as interest in the meerschaum-lined pipe grew even as Türkiye restricted the export of raw meerschaum, Leonard's commissioned fifty Charatans with meerschaum-lined bowls; according to Lou Leonard, of the next generation of owners, only about thirty-five of these could ever be delivered.

The Barling and Sasieni Story

A story often repeated among enthusiasts holds that the shop bought up the entire remaining Barling stock when the Barling family withdrew from the company, and made a similar purchase when Sasieni was liquidated. This account has since been corrected by collectors who followed the period closely. When Barling's management passed to Finlay, a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco, in 1960, the firm's weekly output and on-hand stock were far beyond what any single shop could have bought; according to a Barling collector of the period, the quantity Lou Leonard actually amassed was closer to a hundred pipes. The shift in Barling quality is likewise described not as a sudden break but as a decline spread over years. Sasieni's liquidation in the mid-1980s did see a genuinely large stock change hands, and the shop is thought to have taken a share of it; but here too, the claim that the entire inventory was gathered by a single buyer is not borne out by the record.

Locations, Closure, and Legacy

The business operated from the same corner address for many years; records indicate this location lasted from 1936 to 1983, after which it continued for roughly six more years at another site. There was growth along the way too: the shop's 1972 tobacco catalog brochure shows three separate branches operating at that time. The shop closed in 1989, and its stock was sold off gradually over the following years by its last family owners, Lou and Betty Leonard; a portion of these pieces passed to collectors after being exhibited at the Chicago pipe show.

Today the Leonard's name is remembered under two headings: first, as a member of that vanished generation of great American tobacco shops, and second, for the house pipes stamped with its own name. Because these pipes were made not in the shop itself but in the English workshops it did business with, their shapes and finishes match those houses' own catalogs — which is why some sources classify the name among English brands.