John's Pipe Shop

John's Pipe Shop was a tobacco shop that opened in Los Angeles in 1908 and, for nearly seventy years, was one of the city's main destinations for pipe smokers. The business had no lathe or workshop of its own; it commissioned the pipes it sold from established European factories and put its own stamp on the goods once they arrived. This is why "John's"-stamped pipes found on the secondary market today carry the identity of a retailer rather than a manufacturer.

Shops and Its Place in the City

The business's known address was on South Spring Street in early Los Angeles's commercial center; a second location later opened on Hollywood Boulevard. The existence of the two addresses can be traced through advertisements printed on matchbook covers, which today serve as a primary document for the business's history. It wasn't only the storefront that kept the shop in local memory but street advertising as well: a photograph dated to the first quarter of the century shows a horse-drawn cart with a giant model of a pipe bowl mounted on the back. The business also found its way into trade press of the era; a promotional piece devoted to the shop appears in an American pharmaceutical yearbook from 1916.

House Brands and Stamps

Among the names John's Pipe Shop advertised under the heading "private brands" were Wilshire, Rosemore, Extra, Fairmont, Silvermont, and Avalon. Some of these were taken directly from local geography; Wilshire and Avalon are both well-known boulevard and neighborhood names in the city. The house-brand practice was common among American tobacconists of the era: shops such as Barclay Rex or Iwan Ries & Co. likewise offered the briar pipes on their shelves under their own names.

The stamps are generally split across the two faces of the shank: one side reads the shop name together with the house brand (for example, "JOHN'S WILSHIRE"), while the other carries the origin mark and a shape number. On documented examples the origin stamp reads "LONDON MADE," making the goods' English source explicit.

Tracing the Manufacturer

The way to find the actual manufacturer of these pipes is to compare shape numbers and stamp details against the factories' own catalogues. A number of John's-stamped examples have been identified this way as products of Comoy's of London: the shape numbers match their counterparts in Comoy's catalogues, and the form of the origin stamp fits that same factory's conventions. It is likely other manufacturers supplied the shop as well, but no definitive list is known. For readers wanting to date pipes by stamp form, the Comoy's stamp typology entry is a useful starting point.

Exactly when the business closed is not known with certainty; records indicate it remained open until the 1980s, meaning an operating history of more than seventy years. The pipes that survive stand today as concrete examples of how American tobacconists worked with European factories in the early twentieth century, and they retain their place in collections.