Thomas Allan Dunn (1938-2005)

Thomas Allan Dunn (1938-2005) was the American publisher and compiler behind The Pipe Smoker's Ephemeris, widely considered the longest-running periodical in the pipe world, which he produced single-handedly for forty-one years. Known to his correspondents by his initials, "TAD," Dunn ran both the magazine and the reader community that formed around it from his home in College Point, in the New York City borough of Queens.

Life Beyond Publishing

He was the fourth of Alice and Lawrence Dunn's eight children; the College Point house where he grew up with his siblings remained his address for the rest of his life. His schooling stayed in the same neighborhood: the local St. Fidelis school, followed by Flushing High School. In 1957 he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve, trained at the engineer school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and reached the rank of Specialist 5 (sergeant) by the time of his discharge in 1964. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1969 from New York University's Washington Square College of Arts and Science. Professionally he followed his father into insurance, spending his career at Metropolitan Life in Manhattan, earning the Life Management Institute's fellow designation in 1977, and rising to a managerial post in the company's human resources division. He took early retirement in 1991 to care for his ailing parents.

The Universal Coterie Of Pipe Smokers

The Universal Coterie of Pipe Smokers (TUCOPS), which Dunn founded in 1964, can be translated as "the universal fellowship of pipe smokers." Membership was free: no dues were asked of members, no obligations expected, and the group kept no meeting calendar. New members were mailed a lapel pin and a wallet-sized membership card. By some accounts, membership peaked at around three thousand. The group's presence lived in mailboxes rather than meeting halls, which set TUCOPS apart from the face-to-face tradition of pipe clubs.

Forty-One Years Of The Ephemeris

The magazine was the group's only channel of communication. The first issue is dated December 19, 1964: a single typewritten sheet, filled front and back. Dunn described the publication's schedule as "irregularly quarterly." Over time it grew to magazine size, and some issues ran past a hundred pages. Its content shifted from newsletter to compiled archive: reader letters from around the world, poems, short stories, drawings, literary excerpts, club news, auction results, book bibliographies, Sherlock Holmes miscellany (Sherlockiana), and a "Broken Pipes" section commemorating members who had died. Dunn also catalogued members by their collecting interests, publishing the results from 1981 onward as the Collectors Directory; the eighth and final edition appeared in June 2004.

The magazine arrived at a moment when the field had gone quiet: by 1964, America's pipe-focused periodicals had run their course; Pipe Lovers (January 1946 – April 1950), The American Smoker, and Pipe Smokers Review had all folded, and nothing had replaced them. Every stage of production fell to one person. Dunn sorted incoming material by subject, handled typesetting and layout himself, and personally drove the print-ready copy to a printer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts — a round trip of more than six hundred kilometers. Distribution was his responsibility too: address labels handwritten, envelopes sorted by zip code, and sacks of mail hauled to the post office. The final issue is dated Winter-Spring 2005.

Honors And The Archive He Left Behind

Though Dunn's name was widely known in the community, he himself avoided ceremonies and gatherings. Records show that in 1988 the International Academy of the Pipe, founded in Paris in 1985, elected him its first American corresponding member; Dunn made clear from the outset that he would not attend the annual meetings. In 1998 he became one of the first two recipients of the Chicagoland Pipe Collectors Club's lifetime achievement title, "Doctor of Pipes" (the other was Frank Burla), but he was absent from that ceremony as well.

Dunn died in New York at the end of 2005, after an illness of nearly a year. His will directed that the library, correspondence, and tobacco-related documents he had gathered over the years go to an institution that would keep them open to researchers. The collection is now held by the New York Public Library's Rare Books Division in two separate holdings: an eight-box collection of magazines spanning spring 1965 to 2005, and a forty-one-box collection of correspondence covering mainly 1961 to 2005. Through it, the twentieth-century arc of pipe collecting can now be traced through a firsthand research source.