The Most Expensive Pipe Debate

The "most expensive pipe" is not the name of a single object but a title that has changed hands for roughly a century and a half. Pipes described this way in the press, in record books, and in auction catalogues are so far apart in material, size, and backstory that a direct comparison between them often loses its meaning. This entry looks at what criteria decide the title, and why no single owner has held it for long.

The Problem of Criteria

A pipe's worth cannot be pinned to a single variable. Three factors dominate the antique-pipe literature: material, the labour of carving, and the object's documented history (provenance). Because its carvable structure allowed for months of figural work, meerschaum was almost the only material used for 19th-century showpieces; on the briar side, value tends to hinge instead on grain pattern and the maker's name. The real point of contention is what the ranking should be based on: an owner's or dealer's stated valuation rarely matches the price actually realized at auction. For this reason, collecting circles generally only count a title claim as recorded once the object has actually changed hands.

Monumental Pieces of the World's Fairs

The title's first holders are the outsized meerschaums produced for international exhibitions. The New York manufacturer F. J. Kaldenberg — whose firm was among the industry's leading names until it was liquidated in 1893 — reportedly prepared a multi-tiered table pipe adorned with allegorical figures for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition; the piece's current whereabouts are unknown. Another carved pipe bearing the same maker's signature is held in the Smithsonian collection. William Demuth Company, the era's largest American manufacturer, commissioned a monumental pipe titled "The Discovery of America," carrying more than twenty relief figures, for the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. The Bunker Hill pipe by Boston carver Gustav Fischer Sr., adapted from a painting by John Trumbull, was likewise the product of four years' work and bears more than thirty figures. These objects were not made to be smoked, but to announce a workshop's mastery.

Collections in Circulation

Pieces of this kind eventually changed hands not individually but as whole collections. Records show the Demuth collection passed to the American Tobacco Company in 1940, to the Valentine Museum in Richmond in 1957, and to Austria Tabak in Vienna in 1991. The foundation of the Vienna Tobacco Museum was laid in 1873 with lavish pipes purchased from the Vienna World's Fair held that same year; the museum's permanent exhibition ended sometime in the 2000s, though sources disagree on the exact date. Management and storage of the collection passed to the Schönbrunn Palace administration in 2005. In 2009, the Kunsthistorisches Museum's "Nicotiana" exhibition drew a selection from this holding to mark Austria Tabak's 225th anniversary. In London, meanwhile, Christie's put Alfred Dunhill's antique pipe collection up for sale in 462 lots on 12 May 2004.

Name, Prop, and Jewel

In recent times, what decides the title has often been not the object itself but the name attached to it. The unassuming-looking briar pipe once owned by Albert Einstein, sold by Christie's London on 12 July 2017, fetched a result many times the auction house's estimate; similar jumps occur with film props. At the opposite extreme stand one-off pieces conceived as jewellery from the start: on the Eiffel Tower pipe produced by Dunhill in 2015 to a design by Kalmon Hener, an 18-carat gold tower rises above the briar bowl, set with 492 diamonds, 140 sapphires, and 20 rubies. Such creations are described with the title outright in their promotional material, but because they are one of a kind and usually remain in the maker's hands, they never enter a comparative ranking at all.

For the relationship between a pipe's assigned value and its famous owners, see the entry on Famous Pipe Smokers; for the carving tradition itself, see Eskişehir Meerschaum Carving.