Ed's Hand Made (Edward Kolpin)

Ed's Hand Made is the name given to pipes finished by hand by Edward August Kolpin Sr. in Santa Monica, California. Despite being one of the most recognized names in American pipe retail, Kolpin's real attachment was to the bench; after passing on the chain he founded, he returned to making pipes alone once again. For this reason Ed's Hand Made is considered less a factory brand than one person's signature.

From Pharmacy to Tobacco

That Kolpin was born in 1910 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is the commonly cited information in pipe literature. He chose pharmacy as a profession, studied it at the University of Southern California, and worked for many years at his father's pharmacy. Yet his real interest did not lie in the prescriptions behind the counter. Records indicate that in 1927 he turned the pharmacy's soda-fountain section into a corner where tobacco could be smoked; at the same time he began studying blends on his own and selling them to pipe shops. When this second pursuit outpaced pharmacy in income, a change of profession became unavoidable, and around 1930 he opened the doors of Ed's Pipe Shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.

His 1947 divorce left him financially wiped out. The European trip he took while in debt, however, produced an unexpected outcome: the first pieces of a pipe collection that would grow to thousands of items over the years came from this trip. After returning to the country he built Tinder Box on his family's lot on Wilshire Boulevard, with a facade recalling an old English cottage. The business's founding year differs across sources: local historical records point to 1928, while pipe literature writes that the Wilshire shop opened in 1948. It is known that the store building standing today was built in 1951 and its well-known neon sign in 1953. The shop was one of the haunts of the Hollywood crowd of the period; for named customers, see the entry famous pipe smokers.

The Chain, the Split, and the Scratched Signature

The name Tinder Box was used in other cities as well starting from the late 1950s; records indicate the business primarily turned into a wide franchise network in the 1970s and reached a large number of stores across the country. Kolpin handed the company to his sons Karl and Ed Jr. in 1967; accounts state the brothers sold the chain a few years later to a Canadian investment group. The original shop in Santa Monica, however, split off from the chain.

After this split, Kolpin ran Ed's Original Tinder Box at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Harvard Street, and began making pipes with his own hands again. The briar pipes he produced in this period again carried the name Ed's Hand Made; but instead of a metal stamp, the name was scratched in by hand, often together with the year of manufacture and the name of the person who had commissioned the pipe worked into the body. This practice is considered a distinguishing mark for collectors, since it makes the pipes individually documentable; a similar tradition of personal signing is also seen at other benches within the American handmade pipe scene.

Aftermath

Edward Kolpin Sr. died in 2007 at his home in Santa Monica, aged ninety-seven. The shop was run by his family for a while longer and closed in May 2017, after a history of roughly ninety years. Ed's Hand Made pipes today circulate only in the secondary market; their scratched signatures and dates are among the concrete examples frequently cited in the debate over handmade versus machine-made, a definitional problem in pipes.