Ma Colombe

Ma Colombe is the one-person pipe workshop of French maker Jean Masson, who signed his work with this name instead of his own surname. Records give Masson's birth date as 13 February 1934; he began making pipes in 1970, but founded the brand only in 1991. Ma Colombe is thus less a new workshop than the naming of twenty years' accumulated experience.

A Craft Learned Master to Master

Masson's first trade had nothing to do with pipemaking: he came from soldering work and learned woodworking only later, alongside masters who had come before him. According to the account, the year after he began making pipes he moved to the workshop of Jules Guichon, who worked on classic shapes; he learned the proportions of classic forms from Guichon and carving from Denis Vincent. This dual training explains the brand's later production line: measured classics on one side, free and figurative work on the other.

Carved Bowls and Free Forms

Ma Colombe's distinguishing work is naturally polished carved bowls. Masson's method in this area was to finish one model entirely by hand from start to finish, then reproduce the following ones with a pantograph. A pantograph is a copying lathe that transfers the motion of an arm tracing a template to a cutting tip; while the first piece demands heavy labor, being able to turn out repeats in a reasonable time makes sustained figurative work possible in a one-person workshop. Among his best-known figures are portraits of Georges Brassens, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Charles, Prince of Wales.

The workshop's second strand is freehand shapes, most with a plateau top. Plateau is the outer surface of the briar burl closest to the ground, where the grain runs dense and irregular; left unworked at the top of the bowl, it gives each pipe its own distinct texture. In these pieces the grain is said to run largely vertical, and blocks are said to be preferred from Moroccan sourced briar. Most of Masson's pipes include a small reservoir designed to collect condensed nicotine; a detail he insisted on, it has become the brand's technical signature.

Production Scale

Unlike the factory tradition centered on Saint-Claude, where French pipemaking is concentrated, Ma Colombe always stayed in a single pair of hands. Annual production, including carved classics and freehands, is said to have ranged between 250 and 1,000. Masson is also said to have preferred to deliver his work directly rather than through an intermediary; this preference is cited as the main reason the brand is relatively little known outside France. No account of the meaning behind the name Ma Colombe appears in sources, and the brand's status in recent years is unclear; the records available track production only up to the mid-2010s.