John C. Loring

John C. Loring (1944-2009) was an American pipe collector and researcher known for his work on dating Dunhill (White Spot) pipes. According to his obituary, he was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and practiced law as his profession. His approach of laying stamp forms, period catalogues, and patent records side by side and cross-checking them is regarded as one of the steps that moved Dunhill scholarship from anecdote to documented evidence.

The Dunhill Book

The work that made his name, first published in June 1998, was "The Dunhill Briar Pipe – the patent years and after," considered the first book devoted solely to the Dunhill pipe. The "patent years" of the title refer to the period before 1955, when the firm stamped patent numbers on its pipes. The book is not merely a dating guide: it treats the evolution of the stamps alongside the brand's development from 1905 onward.

What set the guide apart from its predecessors was the direction from which the problem was approached. Earlier guides started from the year and described that year's stamp; Loring reversed the direction, letting the reader work from the stamp in hand to the year. There was a practical reason for this: the collector has the stamp, not the year, in front of them. For pipes with no date code at all, or one too worn to read, patent number and nomenclature tables were compiled separately; these tables serve to place a pipe within a range of a few years. Loring concluded that Dunhill adopted the dating-code practice within 1921, and that regular stamping of the code on pipes became widespread the following year; this distinction is decisive for dating early, code-less examples. The book also contains criteria for dating Parker-branded pipes, boxed Dunhill tobaccos, and pipe accessories. There is not a single photograph in the text; Loring explained this as a preference for circulating the information he had without delay.

The Catalogue Compilation

His second major undertaking was a compilation meant to relieve researchers' shortage of sources. Published in three volumes in December 1999 and completed with a supplementary volume in 2002, the work brings together thirty-three Dunhill catalogues in full, spanning 1910–1962, alongside twenty-nine pipe patents taken out between 1904 and 1940. The number of catalogue pages scanned comes to roughly 1,500. The volumes are divided by period: 1910–1926, 1927–1935, 1936–1962, and the supplement. The supplement includes the firm's first comprehensive catalogue from 1917, a shape catalogue prepared for retailers in the early 1930s, an American catalogue dated to around 1943, and the 1952–1953 Christmas catalogues in which the postwar ODA series first appears. Loring described the purpose of the compilation as building a shared archive that would keep these sources from remaining in the hands of any single person or firm.

Articles and Collection

Beyond the books, he wrote numerous short studies devoted to single topics: the emergence of the white-spot guarantee, the postwar ODA/800 series, an essay searching for the earliest examples of the Shell finish, the pre-1925 Dunhill pipe, and a breakdown of Dunhill tobacco blends drawn from catalogues spanning 1910–1990.

In the summer of 2009 he described his collection as roughly 160 Dunhills and about 80 pipes of other brands. On the Dunhill side, the pipes of the 1910s and 1920s and the large-sized models of 1930–1950 predominated, with churchwarden and carved-bowl examples drawing particular attention. The rest included brands such as Barling, Charatan, Comoy's, GBD, Peterson, Castello, and Savinelli. Japanese tobacco items formed a separate section of the collection: kiseru pipes, tabako-bon tobacco trays, and kiseru cases.

What He Left Behind

After his death his personal website went offline and his writings vanished from the internet with it. A significant portion of the texts was later gathered again on Pipedia under permission he had granted during his lifetime. In discussions of Dunhill stamps, Loring's tables remain among the first sources people turn to.