Bo Nordh

Nordh is the brand name under which Swedish master Bo Nordh (1941-2006) stamped his handmade pipes with his own name. With no factory tradition in his country, Nordh completed only a few dozen pipes a year at his one-man bench; even so, the shapes he developed entered the shared vocabulary of Scandinavian handmade pipemaking. His name is today the first mentioned when pipemaking in Sweden comes up.

From Accident to the Bench

Nordh's move into pipemaking was not a planned career choice but the result of a necessity. A motorcycle accident in his youth confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life and forced him to give up the trade he had been pursuing at the time; records indicate the accident occurred in 1959, when he was eighteen. He went on to study mechanical engineering, but could not find work because of his condition. In the early 1970s, on his wife Birgit's suggestion, he bought ready-drilled briar blocks sold to amateurs at the Pip-Larsson tobacconist in Malmö.

All of his first blocks were ruined; trying to sand away every flaw left no wood behind to make a pipe from. The conclusion Nordh drew from these early attempts set the method for the next thirty years: there is no such thing as a flawless block, so the shape must be built around the flaw. When shop owner Olle Jonsson saw the results, he suggested Nordh have his own mark made and put the pipes in the window; the first batch found buyers quickly.

The Ivarsson Line

On Jonsson's guidance, Nordh met Sixten Ivarsson in Copenhagen. This meeting is considered a turning point for the brand: Ivarsson passed on to Nordh the details of proportion and internal geometry that separate a good-looking pipe from a good smoking one, and also showed him where to find good raw material. Since Ivarsson's bench was right next to Copenhagen's busy shopping street, foreign collectors who stopped by also saw Nordh's work; according to accounts, a Japanese buyer who bought every pipe on hand and then asked for more was the first sign that the work could become a livelihood. Nordh set up his own workshop in Landskrona, adapting the machinery to his own working arrangement using his engineering knowledge; in later years he moved to a farmhouse outside the city.

Material and Method

Annual production never exceeded fifty pipes, and dropped as low as thirty in his later years. This low figure did not come from a lack of demand but from the master's own standard; he would not part with a piece he was not satisfied with. He first roughly ground the blocks, let them rest in a cool place so their moisture would release slowly, then ground them finely and sorted them. A block would rest for at least five years before entering the bench; some waited fifteen or twenty. The reason was technical: wood that has not dried sufficiently will shrink after the pipe is finished, which throws off the fit of the joints.

An unusual habit of his was drilling the pipe only after it had been fully shaped and polished, allowing him to change the design right up to the last moment. Briar was standard for the bowl, vulcanite for the mouthpiece. Horn, boxwood, and bamboo shank were the limited exceptions joining this pair; he never used acrylic or similar contemporary mouthpiece materials. Sandblasted examples of his are rare and are always finished in black.

Shape Repertoire

What sets Nordh apart from being simply a good craftsman is that he developed shapes associated with his own name. The best known is Ramses, with its egg-like bowl; the name is said to have been given by a German customer who, according to the story, likened the pipe to the statues of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Other pieces in this repertoire include Elephant's Foot, whose surfaces bring out birdseye grain; Nautilus, evoking a spiral shell; Ballerina, recalling a ballet dancer standing on tiptoe; Sphinx, with its domed front wall; Oliphant, considered a reinterpretation of Ivarsson's Horn shape; and Bo's Pot, a pot with a waist drawn inward. Bo Nordh died on 12 July 2006, aged sixty-five; he was one of the founding members of the Swedish Pipe Club.