Tom Dunn

Tom Dunn was the publisher who let the pipe community find itself in the pre-internet era. In 1964 he founded both the loosely organized The Universal Coterie of Pipe Smokers and The Pipe Smoker's Ephemeris, the magazine that became the group's voice; he edited and distributed it single-handedly until his death in 2005. Records give Dunn a birth year of 1938, and he ran the publication out of his home in Queens, New York.

How the Magazine Was Made

For forty years, the Ephemeris stayed a one-man operation. Text was typed on a mechanical typewriter, pages were run off on a mimeograph machine in the early decades, and envelopes were stuffed at the house in Queens. Dunn himself described the publication as an "irregular quarterly," and indeed the interval between issues was never fixed — some years passed with only a single number. There was never a subscription fee; getting on the mailing list simply required writing in.

Most of the pages were filled with readers' letters. A correction to a brand's history, notes from a visit to a tobacconist in some faraway city, an announcement of a newly printed book, personal impressions of tobacco, and information supplied by makers and firms could all sit side by side in the same issue. The broader landscape of this kind of publication is covered in the entry on pipe books and periodicals.

The Ephemeris as an Address Book

The magazine's real influence on the community came less from the information it carried than from the contacts it created. New Coterie members' addresses were announced in every issue, and every four years these were compiled into a comprehensive collector's directory; archival records indicate eight editions of this directory were produced. In the years before email and forums, these lists were, in practice, the only way for collectors who otherwise had no idea of each other's existence to correspond by mail and phone, trade pipes, and navigate a narrow field of interest. The magazine, alongside the local clubs that proliferated in the same period, is credited with nourishing the pipe club culture.

Recognition and Archive

When the Chicagoland Pipe Collectors Club first awarded the title of Doctor of Pipes in 1998, Dunn was one of the two people honored, the other being Frank Burla. The title, awarded to two people a year, requires at least twenty years of contribution to the hobby.

The magazine closed with Dunn's death in 2005. The paper records of both the Ephemeris and the Coterie — correspondence, newspaper clippings, original artwork, collector directories, and proofs of the two volumes later turned into books — are preserved in the George Arents Tobacco Collection in the Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library. For Dunn's life story, see the entry on Thomas Allan Dunn (1938-2005).