Manger

Manger is a pipe maker founded by Anton Manger in the village of Wollbach in Germany's Lower Franconia region. Production began in the autumn of 1957. The brand is known for making both understated series models and individually hand-shaped freehand pipes under the same roof.

Founding and Growth

The founder was a craftsman trained in wood carving and turning; he entered the trade not through pipe making but by repairing whatever came to hand during the shortages of the postwar years. Since sound pipes were hard to find in Germany at the time, the repair bench quickly turned into a map of demand. Manger built the cutting tools and lathes needed for production himself over many years, and only reached regular production in 1957.

The business did not remain a small village workshop. According to the record, at its peak in the 1970s it employed nineteen people, with daily output reaching several hundred pipes. This scale is also why the brand is counted among the last professional pipe makers in Germany to have grown "from scratch." In the following decades production contracted again, returning to a family scale.

Style and Product Range

The workshop's founding principle was simple from the start: to make useful, durable, unpretentious briar pipes. The product range was therefore kept broad; at one end sat plain series models in classic dimensions, at the other freehand examples hand-shaped to the grain flow.

Manger pipes give an impression of handwork that favors function over the polished elegance of the Danish school; among collectors they are known primarily for their smoking qualities. The brand first became widely known across Germany in the early 2000s, when the founder's son Arno Manger began promoting the pipes on online auction platforms.

Collection and Written Legacy

Anton Manger was not only a pipe maker but also a writer on pipe history. He authored three books devoted to the history of tobacco, the burl-wood pipes of Ulm, and the meerschaum tradition of Ruhla. For the Ulm tradition, see also the PipoWiki entry Ulmer Maserholzpfeifen.

The founder also built up a collection that began with two porcelain pipes he received from his grandfather at age fourteen. 1,630 pieces from this collection, amassed over thirty years, were sold off in 1984 and formed the core of the Erstes Deutsches Tabakpfeifenmuseum, which opened in 1996 in the historic school building in Oberelsbach. Spread across nine rooms on two floors, the exhibition covers pipe production and tobacco-culture artifacts from the German-speaking world from the 17th to the 20th century.

Anton Manger died in 2021 at the age of ninety-two. Today the brand is remembered as much for the documentation work he left behind as for the pipes it produced.