History and Culture

The pipe trade treats "handmade" and "machine-made" as a clean-cut opposition. In briar pipe making, though, no pipe can be finished entirely by hand tools, nor can a machine complete one on its own.

The Harem Pipe is a tabletop smoking apparatus that appeared on the US market in the mid-20th century, joining a metal ashtray base to a braided flexible hose. The patent it rests on was registered in 1937.

Alfred Dunhill's youngest brother and the company's financial mind. He joined the firm in 1912 and ran Dunhill by post from his homes in Italy and Monaco from 1928 until his death in 1950; his legacy became a charitable trust devoted to tuberculosis research.

Combining the measured discipline of the Danish school with Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, Hiroyuki Tokutomi built a design language that deliberately broke with the briar pipe's expectation of symmetry. This entry examines his approach to form, his biography, and his stamps.

The question of which year Dunhill's earliest sandblasted Shell pipes can be assigned to; the registration timeline, the form of shank stamps, and the problem of examples that might date to before 1919.

A fictional name used by Giulliano Spitaletti, a jeweler and pipe maker working in England, for his bench; an example of the new generation of workshop identities produced by the online pipe community.