The Shift in Publishing Pipe and Tobacco Books: Vanity Press, Print on Demand, and Self-Publishing

The shift in publishing pipe and tobacco books describes how this literature, once an ordinary title in established publishers' catalogs, has over the last fifty years largely turned into books printed out of the author's own pocket. The shift is most visible in the United States; for a general overview of the field, see the pipe books and publications entry.

The Era of Major Publishers

In the first half of the twentieth century, the subject caused no trouble for well-known publishers. Alfred Dunhill's The Pipe Book appeared in London in 1924 under the A. & C. Black imprint; Compton Mackenzie's Sublime Tobacco was published by Chatto & Windus in 1957. In the same years, houses such as Alfred A. Knopf, Little, Brown, and McGraw-Hill in America published volumes on the social history of tobacco. Carl Ehwa's The Book of Pipes & Tobacco also bears the Random House imprint; catalog records show both a 1973 and a 1974 printing of the book. This title is counted among the last wide doors major publishers opened to pipe literature.

From Publishing to Printing

Behind any book lie two distinct, easily conflated activities: publishing, which takes on the risk and makes the investment, and printing, which puts the text on paper. In pipe literature, the first link of this chain has weakened over the past fifty years, leaving mostly the second. According to observers of the field, the great majority of pipe books published after 1975 have entered circulation through a local print shop, through "vanity press" companies that print for a fee, through self-publishing arrangements, or through print-on-demand. In all four, the bill is sent to the author; what separates them is the author's say over the text and the likelihood of the book reaching shelves.

The best-known name on the platform side is CreateSpace. Founded in South Carolina in 2000 under the name BookSurge, the company was acquired by Amazon in 2005 and folded into Kindle Direct Publishing in 2018. For photo-heavy works, online layout and printing services such as blurb.com have also been used.

Reasons for the Retreat

The most frequently cited reason is the narrowness of the readership. In an assessment by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on the 2020 National Health Interview Survey, 12.5 percent of adults used cigarettes and 3.5 percent used cigars; the pipe category, which also encompasses hookah and waterpipe use, stood at only 1.1 percent. The second reason is that publishers view a tobacco-related title as risky in terms of brand reputation and legal liability. The third is that forums and online archives have reduced the need for a printed reference book. Schiffer Publishing, founded in 1974 in Atglen, Pennsylvania by Peter and Nancy Schiffer, published books in this field for many years; according to records, it has recently stopped accepting new pipe-related manuscripts.

Veins That Have Survived

Academic publishing falls outside this picture. Archaeology and cultural-history titles continue to be published by houses such as University of Chicago Press, University Press of Florida, University of Tennessee Press, and Springer. British Archaeological Reports, founded in Oxford in 1974 by Anthony Hands and David Walker, is considered the leading publisher of clay pipe research. The field also has award-winning titles: Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History, published by Harvard University Press, was selected in the North American/US history category at the 2020 PROSE Awards. Mark Irwin and Gary Malmberg's Peterson history, The Peterson Pipe, published by Briar Books Press, won a gold medal in the nonfiction debut category at the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

The community's prevailing view is that a small imprint on the title page does not determine the value of the content; some of the field's most detailed studies have been published through these very routes. That said, print runs are low and distribution is narrow; titles become hard to find within a short time. This is why, for researchers, the reprinting of old books and archival and periodical research sources often remain the only means of access.