Classification of Pipe Shapes

The classification of pipe shapes is the name for the effort to bring order to the confusion caused by different manufacturers calling the same form by different names. Shape names in pipe making have never, in any period, been tied to a standards body; names have become established by passing from workshop to workshop, catalog to catalog. For this reason, three separate levels are used together when describing a pipe: the traditional name, the body's stance, and the manufacturer's own number. The classic pipe shapes entry gives the repertoire of these names, while this entry addresses the system itself.

Family Logic

Shapes are thought of not individually but in rings of kinship. By common consensus the starting point is Billiard: forms like Lovat, Liverpool, Canadian, Lumberman, Pot, Panel, Apple, and Dublin are considered derivatives of the same basic body, obtained by altering proportion, shank length, and mouthpiece (stem) arrangement. Describing a shape therefore takes more than memorizing its name; measurable traits such as the degree of the bowl's (bowl) taper, wall thickness, shank cross-section, and heel shape are what actually distinguish it. The terms in the pipe anatomy entry are the shared language for these measurements.

The second axis is stance. The straight and bent distinction isn't a shape in itself but a qualifier placed in front of an existing shape; Bent Billiard and Billiard are two states of the same family. Bodies that step entirely outside classic molds, meanwhile, are gathered under the freehand heading and are referred to not by shape name but by their designer's signature.

Factory Numbers

19. From the late 19th century onward, the major factories tried to overcome the ambiguity of names with numbers. According to records, Comoy's both named and numbered its shapes in its 1909 catalog; but stamping these numbers onto the pipes themselves only became widespread in the 1920s, and the earliest known stamped example is dated to 1925. Comoy's numbers stayed three digits for a long time; after the brand passed into the Cadogan group in 1979, four-digit codes also began to appear.

Dunhill turned a single number into a multi-layered code. In the brand's matured system, the first digit of the code indicates the bowl size group, the second the mouthpiece form, and the remaining digits the shape itself; for example, 4103 corresponds to a tapered-mouthpiece Billiard from the fourth group. The group scale, numbered one through six, is recorded as having come into use in 1954, and roughly corresponds to chamber volume, though it isn't a precise measure since it varies from shape to shape. The group number being folded into the code as the first digit of the shape number happened later, said to be in the second half of the 1970s; before that, the group was printed as a separate stamp. Charatan's own one-through-six scale carries a similar logic; it's known that the same number doesn't denote the same size across two brands.

Limits of the System

These codes are consistent within a brand but untranslatable between brands: a number's meaning can only be resolved with the chart printed by the manufacturer that used it. Archived shape charts are, for this reason, considered a basic tool for identifying and dating estate pipes. On the naming side, the documentary basis is much weaker; the story behind many shape names has been carried forward by oral tradition, and this debate is addressed separately in the origin of briar pipe shape names entry.