Comoy's Stamp Typology and Dating

Comoy's stamp typology is a method for narrowing the production range of the London firm's pipes by looking not so much at what a stamp says as at how it was struck. The brand never stamped a year code onto a pipe at any point; the date is read not from a single mark but from the combination formed jointly by the letterform, the frame shape, and the mouthpiece mark. The firm's own history is told in the Comoy's of London entry; the general framework of dating is described in the Comoy's dating guide; here the shape of the marks themselves is taken up.

The Shape of the Frame

Two stamps carrying the same words can belong to different periods if their outlines differ. The curving "COMOY'S" and the curving origin wording on the opposite face most often sit not in a full circle but in a squat oval tapering at both ends. A separate group is the mold in which the letters stack to form a closed circle. In the Extraordinaire series, the oval-framed form of the origin wording is seen.

This distinction's boundaries are not sharp. Worn stamp dies were replaced with new ones while the old ones stayed on the bench a while longer; the two forms can therefore turn up side by side on pipes made in the same year. To read the shape number, see the Comoy's shape numbers list.

The Layers of the Origin Wording

The earliest wording is "London Made"; it reaches back as far as 1902, and Comoy's is considered the first London maker to use this phrase. "Made in London," with the word order reversed, is seen on examples stamped 1921, in a straight line beneath the curving brand text. "Made in England" set inside a circle appears on examples dating back to 1910, but only becomes widespread after the 1930s. The circled "Made in London" with a separate "England" line beneath it, on the other hand, is the mark of the postwar export era; no known example predates the Second World War.

The layers don't always line up neatly. On one example whose band shows 1920, two wordings are struck one over the other: a faintly visible "Made in London" with "London Made" struck over it. Such double stampings show that old and new dies were used together during years of transition.

What the Mouthpiece Tells

The inlaid "C" began to be worked into the side face of the mouthpiece around 1919. It is called the "three-piece C" because it requires three separate pieces — one white, two black — and three separate drillings; examples from the 1920s and early 1930s are thinner than postwar ones. On some early pipes the letter sits not on the side face but on top of the mouthpiece. The practice was dropped in the early 1980s, in the Cadogan period; it was replaced first by a single-hole inlay with the letter at its center, then by laser printing. Along with the mouthpiece material, this detail also gives away a mouthpiece that has since been replaced. In the Grand Slam series, meanwhile, a white-turquoise-white striped bar logo was used between 1933 and 1945; after the war this series too returned to the three-piece "C."

Examples Anchored to the Calendar

The typology above is pinned to the calendar thanks to pipes whose year letter can be read. If the band between the shank and mouthpiece is silver, three marks are looked for on it: the walking lion showing the fineness, the symbol showing the assay office (a leopard's head for London), and the letter giving the year. The year-letter system in England goes back to 1478 and changes every year. Even so, the result isn't absolute: since bands arrived at the factory in batches, they may have been fitted months, even a year, after being struck; a band may also have been added much later to repair a cracked shank.

Notable dated examples from collector records give the following table:

Year letter	Brand wording	Other marks
1902	Unframed "HC"	Only additional stamp: "LONDON MADE"
1904	"HC" inside a cartouche	No inlay on the mouthpiece
1913–1914	Forward-leaning script; tail runs back from the "s," under the "o"	"LONDON MADE" in unquoted capitals
1917–1918	Same script; tail runs forward from the "y," under the "s"	Same year, the curving block-letter stamp also in use
1921	Curving "COMOY'S"	Opposite face reads "MADE / IN / LONDON"; oval outline
1959–1960	"COMOY'S" with quotation mark and apostrophe	"MADE IN LONDON" in a circle, "ENGLAND" beneath; three-piece "C"

This sequence is not a fixed calendar but a rough skeleton; because it is compiled from observations of individual pipes, how the intervening years were stamped remains unclear.