108. The Old 900 Shape Group: Restoring an IFS 949 Oval-Shank Billiard

James Arrington, who entrusted me with his Late Patent-Era House pipe, also sent me a vintage billiard to restore that I think you’ll find interesting. It’s one of those shapes that deserve to be reintroduced to the catalog, for one thing—an oval-shank that can be set on a flat surface. One of the great things that characterizes Peterson as a marque is its emphasis on practicality. Over the years the company has released a number of “setters” or flat-bottomed pipes, both bents and straights. There aren’t any oval-shanked straights in the current production catalog, although the classic dublin 120F (“F” in this case for flat) was in the catalog as late as 1965. And then there’s this amazingly dynamic, forward-canted oval-shank billiard. The pipe is stamped with number 949 on the reverse, IRISH over FREE STATE on the bottom of the shank at the mortise, and fork-tail “Peterson’s” over Dublin3 on the top of the shank. The 900-shape group is first glimpsed in a Viennese distributor’s Peterson chart from the mid-1920s and was firmly ensconced by the 1937 catalog, where it is presented in the “K” and “1st Quality” lines as the 949 and in the Kapet and De Luxe lines as the 260. The same shape (as sometimes happens with Peterson) is double-described. Twenty-one shapes from the 900 group are found in the 1937 catalog, but by the 1945 catalog this numbering system had disappeared, with the shapes formerly double-described moving into the Classic Range numbers still in use today. The usefulness of this knowledge for the collector is in knowing that, with one or two exceptions, almost any pipe with a 900 number was made before 1945. (I'm not forgetting the 999 or its brief-lived cousin, the 998 that became the 999.) The big 1942 George Yale catalog illustrates sixteen of these shapes, and a close scrutiny of the page shows the shank on the large pipe is stamped SHAMROCK and the nickel band is stamped with a shamrock image  under the nickel marks, both indicative of the Rogers Imports Shamrock line. (The page is reproduced on p. 102 of the book.) James’s pipe is an earlier-made example of the large pipe, which seems to have been mis-marked as the slightly-smaller oval shank 977. The apple in the Yale page is part of the same problem: it is really shape 969 (per the 1937 catalog). I love how these old catalogs would once in a while throw the pipeman a bone in the way of a 1 to 1 reproduction. George Yale did a good job sizing the image of the pipe—as you can see, they match up almost perfectly. At present, Peterson make a series of billiards that could almost be matryoshka (nesting) dolls: you can start with the incredible 107 and nest inside it the incrementally smaller X105, 105 and 101.  I wish they’d bring a little more diversity to their straight billiards and back the old diamond-shanked 109 and something like this oval-shank 949, or…

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