Preben Holm

Preben Holm (1947-1989) was a Danish pipe maker. In the first generation of the Danish school, shape remained a measured interpretation of the classic patterns, but Holm stepped outside that boundary and popularized large, showy pipes that followed the grain of the wood. Standing at the head of a forty-five-person production operation at twenty-two, and the attention his pipes drew in America, quickly made him one of the most talked-about names in his country.

Beginnings in Copenhagen

Holm's first contact with the pipe came from behind a counter: he started out doing odd jobs at his father's shop in Copenhagen, and by the age of fourteen was effectively running the pipe and tobacco department's purchasing himself. With the tips he saved up he acquired his first workbench and his own tools; his workshop was a room of a few square meters in his father's basement. By his own account, he handed his first pipes over to his father's shop on 5 June 1963, eleven days before his sixteenth birthday. He then applied to the city's tourist-known Pipe-Dan shop, which agreed to take twenty to thirty pipes a week, though pricing authority stayed with the shop. At eighteen he hired his first journeyman; when keeping the business afloat became difficult during his military service he was forced to let him go, and it was only after his discharge that he turned production into a regular enterprise.

A Grain-Led Approach to Shape

Holm's distinctive contribution was building shape from the grain of the briar block rather than fixing it in advance. Reading the block and drawing the shape out of it, instead of imposing a mold on the wood, sent the result somewhere different every time; the resulting pipes were both larger and more irregular than the measured Danish line of the period. Using polished and sandblasted surfaces side by side on the same body, and deliberately leaving the unworked bark of the root at the rim and shank end, were the visible signatures of this style. Smokers accustomed to established taste found the look strange for a long time; yet these very features became the emblem of the movement that made the freehand pipe the most sought-after type of the 1970s.

The American Market and Ben Wade

The first great opening came when Lon Schwartz, who had a shop in Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, bought up eighteen pipes Holm had left on his hands wholesale and asked for sole distribution across the country. In 1969, striking a deal with the New York-based firm Snug Harbour, Holm also moved into serial production; the operation quickly grew to forty-five people. But when Snug Harbour failed to make its payments, he faced a serious loss of receivables. His February 1971 meeting in New York with Lane Limited director Herman G. Lane proved to be the turning point. Because the pipes could not be sold under his own name on account of the stock left with Snug Harbour, the name Ben Wade — owned by Lane Ltd. and produced at the time in the Charatan workshops — was used instead. Danish-made Ben Wade pipes soon reached high volumes; in this period Holm wound down serial production and refocused on handwork, also running separate lines such as Rungsted.

The Final Years

As interest in freehand pipes waned in the American market, Holm was forced to let go of most of his employees at the end of 1985; owing to his worsening illness he closed the factory entirely in early 1986. An attempt to return to production that same year came to nothing because of his health, and he died in 1989 at forty-two. Poul Winsløw, who had joined his workshop at seventeen and risen over time to foreman, went on to produce under his own name after the closure, continuing a line close to Holm's formal language.