Cope Bros & Company: From Tobacco Maker to Publisher

Cope Bros & Company was a tobacco manufacturer founded in Liverpool in 1848 by brothers Thomas and George Cope. What sets the firm apart in tobacco history is not its product range but its publishing: a company that produced both its promotional and its reading material in-house left behind a monthly magazine, pocket-sized booklets, large color lithograph cards, and cigarette cards. Researchers studying Victorian tobacco culture draw most heavily on this body of material today.

The Firm's Course

The factory moved into a former church building on Lord Nelson Street in 1853 and remained there for more than forty years. By the 1880s it employed close to two thousand people; women made up most of the workforce, and its working conditions were held up as exemplary in the press of the day. Thomas Cope died in 1884 and the company went public the following year, with George Cope becoming its first managing director. Among its pipe tobaccos, Bond of Union stands out, still traceable today in collecting records; the catalogue is also noted to have included names like Bristol Bird's Eye, Rifle Cake, and Golden Cloud, along with Cavendish-type blends. Its independent existence ended when it was taken over by Gallaher in 1952.

Cope's Tobacco Plant

The monthly Cope's Tobacco Plant, whose first issue appeared on 30 March 1870, spelled out its target readers right in its name: the manufacturer, the seller, and the smoker. The magazine is known to have been edited by John Fraser. That the first issue exceeded ten thousand copies rests only on secondary accounts; no print record confirms the figure.

Part of its pages was devoted to the trade: tobacco farming, customs and tax regulations, the machinery entering manufacture. The rest was given over to literature. The "Mixtures" column followed literary topics, while "The Smoke-Room Table" was devoted to book reviews; poet James Thomson's contributions appeared regularly in the magazine. The illustrations were prepared by artist John Wallace (1841-1903), who signed his work "Pipeshank." The publication is generally held to have closed in early 1881, though some sources place the final issue in 1879.

Booklets and Cards

About a decade after the magazine closed came the fourteen-volume Smoke-Room Booklets series; the first booklet appeared in 1889, and the series was completed within the first half of the 1890s. The booklets combined pieces that had already run in the magazine with new compilations: selections from Charles Lamb, Thomas Carlyle, and James Thomson, alongside Pipes and Meerschaum, printed in three parts and devoted directly to the pipe and to meerschaum. The series' thirteenth volume was compiled from writings by John Ruskin; when the author obtained a court injunction in 1893 over unauthorized use, the firm halted distribution.

Cards were a separate tradition. From 1874 onward, subscribers received a large color lithograph each year, most often in February. These were crowded scenes that built the day's debates into caricature; because working out who was who was left to the reader, the firm included a separate key alongside each one. Around the turn of the century came series of twenty-five and fifty cigarette cards: golfers, cathedrals, castles, footballers, Dickens characters. One fifty-card set printed around 1900 had a Walter Scott theme, including the Scott Monument in Edinburgh.

Taken together, these publications recorded the pipe and tobacco world of their own era in the language of that era, giving later researchers first-hand material; many of the compilations mentioned in the entries on pipe books and publications and industry-history research sources draw on Cope's collections.