Sydney P. Ram

Sydney P. Ram is a pipemaker and tobacconist who worked in Chicago through the 1930s and into the early 1940s. His shop stood at 59 West Monroe, in the city's Loop business district. Ram's name is remembered today both for the pipes he left behind and for a handbook he wrote on pipe smoking; because the pipes he made were limited in number, he is mostly known through secondhand collecting.

Shop and Production

Ram's business was not just a point of sale but also a small-scale production and service workshop. A sixteen-page promotional catalogue from the shop's era survives, and it stands as the most concrete document of how the business operated. The catalogue states that the pipes' briar blocks came from Algeria and Corsica. According to the same document, the business prepared its own tobacco blends and also handled pipe repair on-site; a customer could thus find pipes, blends, and maintenance all under one roof.

The pipes generally bear the "Sydney P. Ram" stamp in a script style. In addition, the stamp set includes phrases such as "straight grain" or "imported briar" indicating the quality of the block. Ram's pipes were finished with a light polish; it is said this surface would darken to a deep brown at an unusually fast rate with use.

The Book and Life After Chicago

In 1941 Ram published a guide on pipe smoking titled How to Get More Fun Out of Smoking; A Guide and Handbook for Better Smoking. The book remains accessible today, having been reprinted years later, in 2011. The text is a practical handbook written in the tobacconist idiom of the period, and it has made Ram's name a reference point beyond his work as a pipemaker.

The Chicago shop closed in 1942. According to records, Ram moved to California after this date and continued making pipes for a while using the old block stock he brought with him. For this reason examples made from Chicago-era material after his "retirement" are also in circulation; around 2013, unused old-stock pipes of California origin were reported to have surfaced.

Two Spellings of the Name

One detail noted by those who study the brand is that the maker's name appears in two different forms: "Sydney" on the pipe stamps, but "Sidney" in his catalogue and correspondence. This duality causes confusion in source surveys; when identifying a given example, one must account for both spellings while reading the stamp on the shank and stem — see the entry pipe anatomy for those parts.

Ram's workshop stayed at the scale of a tradesman serving his own city's customers, not a large factory. This scale is the main reason his name is remembered in American pipe history not as a major producer, but as a well-documented small business of its era.