Alfred Dunhill's The Pipe Book (1924)

Alfred Dunhill's The Pipe Book is, among works that treat the pipe's history on a world scale, both the most frequently reprinted and the most debated. The book was published in 1924, in London by A. & C. Black and in New York by Macmillan. Its author, Alfred Dunhill (1872-1959), founder of the Dunhill firm that bears his name, was in the years he wrote it both a well-known manufacturer and the owner of a notable pipe collection. As the lengthy subtitle announces, the volume contains 28 full-page plates (four in color) and 230 drawings scattered through the text.

The Book's Scope

It was not the first attempt of its kind. English painter and gunsmith Robert Taylor Pritchett's Ye Smokiana, published by Bernard Quaritch in 1890, had already brought together an illustrated survey of world pipes in a single volume thirty years earlier; there, the drawings were the primary element and the accompanying text secondary. In Dunhill's volume, that balance is reversed.

The chapter titles give away the book's intent: why people smoke, crude early pipes, straight and tube-shaped examples, pipes recovered from burial mounds, the pipes of North American Native peoples and the ceremonies that accompanied them, the peoples of South America, the polar regions, the Far East, water pipes, Africa's countless forms, clay pipes, selected European examples, and finally modern briar. The emphasis is markedly ethnographic; the space given to ceremonial pipes akin to the calumet far exceeds that given to the briar pipes that dominated the market in the years the book was written. Records note that the final chapter, on modern briar, runs to a mere eight pages. Dunhill was well aware of what he was doing: in his preface he asks specialists' indulgence in advance, describing the work not as a scholarly study but as a simple book. The volume has no bibliography and no footnotes.

Reception at the Time

As soon as it was published, the book found wide coverage in the British and American press. Period reviews praised the wealth of information and the visual apparatus; some found the text heavy going for the ordinary reader. Assessments in anthropology publications welcomed the author's avoidance of facile generalizations. Dunhill was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1925.

A Century-Long Chain of Editions

The first edition, carrying the color plates, is known to be the only one to do so; later printings reduced the images to black and white. The book was republished in a revised form by Arthur Barker in 1966 and by Macmillan in 1969. Editions grew more frequent from the end of the century onward: Lyons Press (1999), Gramercy (2000), a 2002 edition with a foreword by Alfred Dunhill's grandson Richard Dunhill, and Skyhorse (2011). It was translated into German as Das Pfeifenbuch. This continuity is also part of the broader trend around the reprinting of pipe literature whose copyright has lapsed.

Today's reader's objection comes from elsewhere. Readers who acquire the book expecting a history of Dunhill's own pipes, or a maintenance manual, report finding a very different text instead. The work, however, is not a brand monograph but a cultural history spanning materials to ceremony; it was not written to offer guidance on shape, care, or blending. Its having stayed in print for more than a century has earned it a distinct place within pipe literature.