Soborg

Soborg is one of the secondary stamps used at the workshop of Danish master Søren Refbjerg Rasmussen. The name comes from where the workshop stood: Søborg is a suburb within the municipality of Gladsaxe, about ten kilometers northwest of Copenhagen. These pipes, whose bowl tops were mostly left unworked and whose shanks were kept shorter than usual, carried no maker's name and so long remained among the pieces whose ownership could not be traced.

A Secondary Name Within the Workshop

Rasmussen was born in 1943 and began working in the trade full time with the company he founded in 1969. By the 1970s the workshop had grown into a business employing eight to twelve craftsmen, and the semi-freehand pipes coming out of it were sold mostly under the master's first name, the Søren stamp. Soborg is one of the names used alongside this main line. For the later-period work Rasmussen carried on alone under his own surname, see the Refbjerg entry; the hand-carved Danbark series is likewise linked to the same workshop, though whether this name counts as a secondary stamp in the same sense as Soborg is not clear from the sources.

Dating and Identification

Linking these pipes to Rasmussen's workshop was initially just a guess; today it is at least accepted that they were produced at this workshop. This does not mean the bodies were finished by the master's own hand: in 2007, Rasmussen told a buyer who contacted him that these pipes had been made roughly thirty years earlier, and probably not by him personally but by those working alongside him. According to records, production thus falls within the 1970s and 1980s; the sole basis for this dating is the master's own recollection, and it has not been supported by an independent document.

A second point of reference concerns the breakup of the workshop. According to the account given, after Rasmussen's retirement, the workshop's contents — machinery, remaining pipes, and paperwork — were bought by another master of the same surname, Poul Rasmussen; this paperwork is said to have confirmed the source of the Soborg name. Since this information rests on a single account, it should be treated with caution.

Shape Characteristics

It is said that Soborg pipes were assembled from bodies left over from daily production with shanks that had come out short; these bodies were accumulated and finished in batches twice a year, then released under this name. It is noted they were sent mainly to Britain and the United States.

The main visual signature is that the top of the bowl was left unworked: on most pieces, the natural bark surface of the briar burl — that is, the plateau top — is preserved. Examples cut flat and polished are the minority. The combination of a short shank with an unworked top is considered a workshop-scale adaptation of the free-form thinking common to Danish workshops of the period; a similar approach was also followed at the Preben Holm workshop. In this respect the stamp is a typical example, within the Danish School, of the export-oriented wing that worked under secondary names.