Peretti (L.J. Peretti Co.)

Peretti is the brand of pipes and tobacco blends sold under its own name by the Boston tobacconist L.J. Peretti Co. The shop was opened in 1870 by Libero Joseph Peretti, an immigrant from Lugano; records place it as the second-oldest tobacconist still operating in the United States, ranking behind only Iwan Ries & Co., dated to 1857.

From Cigar Workshop to Pipe Bench

The business's original form had to do not with pipes but with cigars. At the shop the founder opened in Boston's North End, he sold cigars he blended himself; a workshop set up in 1892 on Park Square employed around fifty rollers, and Cuban leaf cigars were rolled here for more than forty years. Pipes gained weight in the second generation, in the period of the founder's son, known at the shop by the nickname "The Major" — Joseph Peretti. Blending pipe tobacco began in this period, and the shop's first English-style blend — that is, a mix weighted toward Latakia — went on the shelf in these years under the name "British." In the same period, the shop became Boston's sole retailer of Peterson pipes brought over from Ireland, a distinction that reinforced the store's standing on the pipe side. According to a record on Pipedia, pipe production at the shop began in the 1920s, and third-generation Robert A. Peretti carried this work forward by his own hand from 1938.

The company at one point had more than one branch in the city's business district. The store on Massachusetts Avenue closed in the mid-1950s due to highway construction; the business today is gathered under a single roof, in the Park Square store just beside Boston Common.

Pipes and Blends

Peretti-stamped pipes do not carry the signature of a single workshop; they are briar pipes the shop had made under its own name and finished at its own bench. Simple, classic proportions were largely favored, and most of the smooth-polished examples were left unstained or in a light tone; the reasoning given for this preference is that the wood darkens on its own with use. In this respect Peretti, like Ehrlich's, its longtime rival in the same city, is counted a "shop brand" that defines its product through its own storefront.

The brand's real fame, however, lies on the tobacco side. According to accounts, the Thanksgiving blend prepared in the second generation in 1939 became one of the shop's seasonal traditions. Robert Peretti, who took over the business after the Second World War, created more than eighty house blends and was known for his blending until his death in 2019. These blends carry the shop's own name and are prepared at the Park Square bench; what the brand's name first brings to mind within the pipe community is likewise not a single pipe model but this list of blends. The business later passed outside the family, with management taken up by Stephen Willett, who had worked at the shop for many years.

Today

The company marked its 150th year in 2020, releasing a special blend for the occasion honoring its founding date. The Peretti name is recalled today in American pipe culture less as the name of a single master's workshop than as the name of an unbroken tobacconist tradition.