Yearly Archives: 2020

Seen in the banner above: William Conroy is “hand-fitting mouthpieces to some of the 101 shapes that find their way to 50 different countries” from K&P, November 1954. [1] (Ralle Perrera) Nollaig Shona, Happy Christmas! My gift to you today is an extraordinary, illustrated production history of Kapp & Peterson from 1960 written by Detlef Seiffert and Malachy Hynes. I wanted it to appear in The Peterson Pipe but couldn’t justify the space. It is so very rich that I thought this might be the perfect opportunity to share it with you. Seiffert spent two months in early 1960 working in the bowl department as part of his preparation for his family’s pipe and tobacco wholesale business, Heinrich Seiffert & Sohn.[2] He is to this day remembered with great fondness by the retired crafts folk at K&P. Hynes was a prolific Irish journalist with a keen instinct for the finest details of human interest and provides us with several important facts about the “Kapps family” we would not otherwise know. Detlef Seiffert is important to Pete Geeks for other reasons as well. He was Harry Kapp’s younger cousin for one thing. Detlef’s son Jan Harry was Harry’s godson, and was given his middle name in honor of Kapp. Jan Harry (who passed away in 2019) would go on to a career as an artisan pipe-maker and jazz musician. Significantly, he learned silver-smithing at K&P and would later design the Sherlock Holmes Hudson and Mycroft shapes. Seiffert’s other son Oliver would run the family business, distributing Peterson pipes until sometimes in the 1990s. He currently owns Cigar and Pipe Shop Seiffert. It was Oliver Seiffert who sent a copy of his father’s typescript to Tom Palmer and Bernadette O’Neal in April, 1996.[3] At some point this copy passed into the hands of Pete Geeks, where it made the rounds. I received mine in 2011 from the late “Trucker” Chuck Wright, a passionate Peterson pipeman without whom we would not have been able to write The Peterson Pipe. While most of Detlef’s photographs are unviewable due to photocopy degeneration,  I have been able to identify many of them, which were found in the archives at Peterson in 2013, and have included several here, as well as a few that appear to have been taken but not used for Malachy Hynes’s work. The typescript seems to have been edited by Harry Kapp in pen after it was given to him and then signed by both men. Paddy Peacock turning down silver in a great unused photo from the Chamber of Commerce article The account you’re about to read originated in a piece published in the Dublin Chamber of Commerce Journal in 1954. It had no byline but was reprinted in 1960 a slightly different form for the Irish Times, this time with Hyne’s name.[1] Wanting to be as comprehensive as possible, the 21-year-old Seiffert used chunks of Hynes’s earlier work for his own August 1960 “thesis project,” rounding it out considerably by including…