History and Culture

The trail of a mammoth-ivory Siberian pipe from Alfred Dunhill's collection, pictured on the dust jacket of The Pipe Book, goes cold after the shop was bombed in 1941. The piece's recognition in the US and its arrival at auction in 2020 is a documented example of how provenance tracing actually works.

A non-profit craft school founded in 2020 by four Italian pipemakers during the pandemic lockdowns, built on a master-apprentice model.

The cross-section of the channel running from the chamber to the tip of the mouthpiece in a pipe has been one of the community's most contentious technical topics since the late 1990s. The case for an open channel and the objections to it are compared here.

Alfred Dunhill's 1924 book The Pipe Book brings the history of the pipe worldwide together in a single volume. Its being in print for over a century, and the gap between what readers expect from it and what they find, have made it the most talked-about title in the literature.

Founded in New Jersey in 1978 by two friends, American Smoking Pipe Co. deliberately chose its name to set itself apart from a pipe world dominated by European names. The workshop still operates today from Montana, under Mark Tinsky.

An American Imagist poet who defied the femininity norms of her time by smoking cigars in public, and who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously; the meerschaum pipes attributed to her in collections have written her name into tobacco history too.