Tiffany & Company: A Silver House's Tobacco Accessories

Tiffany & Company is an American firm founded in New York in 1837, best known for its jewelry and silverwork. Its place in pipe history is not owed to mass production; from its founding until the mid-twentieth century, the firm sold tobacco accessories — cases, lighters, ashtrays, amber mouthpieces, and pipes now documented by only a handful of surviving examples — in the section it referred to as "fancy goods."

The Founding of a Silversmithing House

Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young opened the shop on Broadway in lower Manhattan as a stationery and fancy-goods store; the starting capital was a thousand dollars, drawn from Tiffany's father's cotton mill. The founding name was Tiffany, Young and Ellis. In 1853, when Charles Tiffany took over management, the name was shortened to Tiffany & Company and the emphasis shifted to jewelry. During the American Civil War, the firm supplied swords, flags, and surgical instruments to the Union army; at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition it won an award in the silverware category, becoming the first American firm to do so. The Medal of Honor design known as the "Tiffany Cross," prepared for the navy in 1919, is also the work of this house. The silverwork craftsmanship behind the mounting on the tobacco accessories rests on this very silversmithing heritage.

Tobacco Goods That Made the Catalog

How this line narrowed can be traced through trademark registration records. The scope of the 1920 registration is still broad: amber pipes and mouthpieces, leather or silk cases, humidors of glass, wood, or base metal, and ashtrays are all grouped under a single heading. Reaching the record filed in 1981 and registered in 1982 — more than sixty years later — what remains are cases, lighters, pipe cleaners, and cigar cutters; both the amber mouthpiece and the pipe have dropped from the list. Records show that gold and platinum women's cases first entered the firm's lists in 1911. Tiffany was not alone in this showcase: Gorham Manufacturing Company, founded in Providence in 1831, offered silver matchboxes and cases, while the Paris houses Cartier and Hermès addressed the same clientele with lighters, cases, and smoking sets.

Stamped Pipes and the Problem of Provenance

In the catalog Bejewelled by Tiffany 1837-1987, published in 2006 and covering the firm's jewelry making, only a single pipe is seen. Dated 1881, this piece has a meerschaum bowl and an amber mouthpiece; its silver mounts pair Japanese style with native American motifs. According to the information given in the catalog, it is entered in the record books under design number 579 and the name "Turk's Head," one of the firm's seven pipe shapes.

A second example is a pipe made of silver and ivory; what raises the real controversy, however, is the provenance attached to it. Chicago collector John F. H. Heide entered the pieces he gathered between 1900 and 1941 into a typewritten catalog, which surfaced only after his death in 1946. Entry number 198 states that the pipe was said to have been made at Tiffany's around 1890 and was given by England's Lord Chief Justice, Lord Alverstone, as a gift to Yiddish playwright Jacob M. Gordin. Yet this dating is inconsistent with both men's biographies: Richard Everard Webster took both the Alverstone title and the Chief Justiceship only in 1900, while Gordin did not arrive in New York until 1891. The pipe changed hands when the Heide collection was dispersed at a sale conducted by Sotheby Parke Bernet's PB Eighty-Four department in New York on April 4, 1978; it reportedly came up for auction once more in 1991 and was seen again in Paris in 2024.

The trail of Tiffany-stamped tobacco accessories is today followed less through pipe literature than through silver and jewelry catalogs, trademark records, and collection lists. This is also, to some degree, why this line has always remained on the margins of pipe history.