Ernie Markle Pipes

Ernie Markle Pipes is a pipe signature carried on in a one-man workshop the maker set up in his own home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Every step, from selecting the block to the final polish of the mouthpiece, comes from the same hands; annual output therefore stays limited to a small number of pipes. Markle's move to full-time pipemaking dates to the early 2010s.

Work That Stays in One Pair of Hands

The Danish school's imprint is evident in Markle's pipes: bodies are built in stout, muscular proportions, with lines kept short and left dynamic. Alongside classic molds he also gives room to freehand interpretations; the choice between approaches is often said to be made by looking at the block's grain. Pieces with dense, regular growth rings are finished with sandblasting to bring out the texture; blocks with clean grain are left smooth-polished. A thin silver or boxwood band is occasionally seen where shank meets mouthpiece.

Mouthpieces are not selected from ready-made castings but shaped individually from ebonite rod. The tenon fitting is also said to be mostly turned from the same rod, with delrin reached for only rarely. This approach is consistent with ebonite standing out in handmade pipes for the soft feel it leaves in the mouth, among mouthpiece materials.

How He Came to the Pipe

Markle's education is in philosophy and Spanish; his career before shutting himself into the workshop was in finance. His interest in the craft began when, while looking through thousands of custom-made pipes online, he started asking how these shapes came about, and then discovered an online forum where pipemakers discussed technique. The cost of the necessary bench and equipment delayed his actually starting for roughly two years.

A few months after finishing his first pipes, he attended Chicago's major pipe gathering, took part in a two-day pipemaking seminar held there, and received an assessment of his work from experienced makers. At the same gathering, invitations to the workshop came from two veteran North American makers: Brad Pohlmann and Jeff Gracik, who works under the name J. Alan Pipes. The period Markle began to trust his own skill traces back to the time spent in these two workshops.

Today Markle's name is counted among those representing the second generation of independent American pipemaking since the 2010s.