Pipe Auctions

Pipe auctions are sales in which pipes and tobacciana change hands through open bidding. What circulates through these sales is most often not single pieces but dispersing collections and the inventories of closing museums. Because signed carvings, documented pieces, and out-of-production examples have frequently entered the record for the first time through such a catalog, the auction is also one of the primary sources for the history of pipe collecting. Tobacciana being recognized as a category in its own right at auction dates back only to the late 1970s.

The Saleroom's Filtering Logic

An auction house takes goods on consignment from the owner and earns a commission on the sale price. For this reason it places in its catalog only the goods it expects to draw lively bidding; a piece that fails to meet that expectation is turned away. The tobacciana seen in saleroom catalogs therefore represents not the whole of the material in circulation but a narrow upper slice of it. Collector fairs and online auction sites apply no such filter and circulate a far wider range; the first of these sites was founded by Pierre Omidyar in California on 3 September 1995 under the name AuctionWeb, which took the name eBay in September 1997. By contrast, the illustrated catalogs printed for major saleroom sales record the sale date, lot number, description, and previous owner in writing. The chain of provenance that is so often missing in the estate pipe market survives permanently in these catalogs.

Beginnings in New York

According to the record, the first auction devoted solely to pipes was held on 4 April 1978 in New York, in Sotheby Parke Bernet's PB Eighty-Four sales division, and was described in the press of the time as the city's first pipe auction. The house's history reaches further back: Parke-Bernet Galleries was founded in 1937, and Sotheby's acquired a majority stake in 1964. The sale comprised 291 lots, including eight carved briar pipes bearing the Garlow signature and depicting scenes, and a pearwood pipe traced to the Bavarian royal family, bearing a handwritten ownership note inside the bowl. Most of the carvings are dated to 1949–1952; nothing reliable about the carver is known beyond the surname given in the catalog.

This sales channel proved lasting. According to the record, Guernsey's dispersed a large private collection in New York in January 1991, and Hesse Galleries in Otego sold a pipe set of roughly six hundred pieces, assembled since the 1930s, on 8 October 1994. When the estate of comedian George Burns, who died at the age of one hundred on 9 March 1996, was sold that same year at Sotheby's Los Angeles, the listing also included a meerschaum pipe. James D. Julia, of Maine, put more than four hundred lots of tobacciana up for sale on 13 February 1999.

London, Vienna, Paris

Starting in the 1980s, the center of gravity shifted to Europe. Christie's South Kensington saleroom, opened in 1975 by the house founded in 1766 and closed in July 2017, became the leading address for tobacciana; according to the record, the window displays and remaining British pipe stock of a tobacconist's shop that had served Cambridge for nearly two centuries were dispersed there at the end of 1987. Also according to the record, in 1990 Phillips disposed of the entire contents of a private pipe museum that had opened in England in 1973, through a sale spread across three stages.

When public and corporate museums decide to deaccession pieces, they do not, as a rule, sell them directly to private individuals; auction is therefore often the only route. Vienna's tobacco museum closed after Austria Tabak passed entirely to the Gallaher Group in January 2002; part of its inventory, according to the record, was dispersed in Vienna in the autumn of 2002 through a sale of more than a thousand lots. The founder of the Dunhill brand's own collection of pipes, tobacco jars, and books was, according to the record, dispersed through two separate sales at Christie's South Kensington in 2004 and 2006.

According to the compilation of a collector who has followed the field since 1969, by the spring of 2009, 178 auctions selling pipes had been held worldwide: 55 in the United States, 46 in Britain, 47 in Paris, and 30 in the rest of Continental Europe. That amounts to an average of four sales a year over a span of forty years. The center of this concentration in Paris is the Hôtel Drouot, which opened on 1 June 1852; it is not the saleroom of a single firm but a sales center jointly used by independent auctioneers.