Barclay Rex

Barclay Rex is a tobacconist's shop opened in lower Manhattan in 1910 by Vincent Nastri, and kept in the same family to this day. Its founder was a pipemaker who had emigrated from Italy; records give his hometown as Salerno. In the shop's early years, part of what sat on its shelves was pipes made by Nastri's own hand. The name arose from a combination of two sources: Barclay Street, where the first shop stood, and Rex, Nastri's Great Dane.

The Story of the Name and the Early Years

How the second word in the shop's name became permanent rests on a story told within the family: as the account goes, rather than placing a newspaper ad, Nastri used his dog instead, fitting Rex with a cover bearing the shop's name and walking the animal around the neighborhood. This detail has no documented basis; what is certain is that the dog's name settled into the business's name.

The business built its early years on pipes and pipe tobacco, later broadening its range toward cigars. Its address did not stay fixed either. The shop moved more than once within Manhattan's financial district, with known addresses including Broad Street, 42nd Street near Grand Central, and Lexington Avenue; the opening and closing dates of these branches do not agree across sources. In later years the business consolidated into a single shop on Pearl Street. According to news sources, management passed in 2019 to Vanessa Nastri, a descendant of the founder; which generation of the family is now at the helm varies from source to source.

Barclay-Rex Stamped Pipes

The shop did not confine itself to selling other makers' pipes; it also ran a line under its own name. These pipes spanned a wide range, from plainly worked examples for everyday use to the carefully made pieces collectors seek out. By all accounts, the bodies used Algerian briar at least through the 1960s; Algerian briar was, until that time, one of the industry's main sources of raw material.

Some of the house-brand pipes were made elsewhere. One known example is the private-label pipes the English manufacturer Sasieni made for a time on Barclay-Rex's behalf; these carry Sasieni's own shapes and shape numbers. Arrangements of this kind were a common route for shops without a workshop of their own, or whose production outstripped their capacity.

The HGP Stamp Debate

The detail most discussed in collecting circles is the "HGP" stamp seen on some Barclay-Rex pipes. According to the account passed down within the family, these letters belong to a maker who worked for the shop for a time and set a small light-colored dot into the mouthpieces; because this dot detail directly calls to mind the Dunhill tradition, the story has attracted attention.

Against this, the same letters also appear in shop advertisements going back to 1920, where they look more like a commercial mark than a person's name. No document exists today to settle definitively between the two explanations. The stamped pipes are held to have been made in a single series, never repeated afterward; for this reason the HGP stamp is regarded as the main clue for collectors trying to trace the shop's early production.