213. The Hallmark Silver Cap & Chain Special-Issue System (1974)
Most Peterson collectors & companioners these days think of 1981’s Mark Twain as the first great K&P commemorative, and over time it has certainly become the most famous. It was the fortuitous combination of a charismatic System smoker and a great System pipe. Fans were (and are) particularly fond of the MT’s space-fitting B or tapered stem, with an affection the company has rarely tried to satisfy in subsequent System releases. But before the MT, there was another commemorative, just as fascinating and considerably harder to find on the estate market—the 1974 Hallmark Silver Cap” System. It didn’t appear in the landmark “Centenary Catalog” from 1975, but it did appear in the subsequent 1979 update: The Hallmark Silver Cap was originally released in 1974, as we find out in some sales promotion materials from William F. Sweeney, who headed up Peterson’s Associated Imports, the company who distributed K&P pipes from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s. It’s worth your perusal (even though the front page says it was released in 1976), so I’ve placed it as a downloadable PDF below the following image: Hallmark Silver Cap 1974 K&P Sweeney’s rhetoric is one I haven’t heard since collecting catalogs from our family mailbox when I was a teen. It’s obvious that he either trained with or was certified as a snake oil salesman before he became the director of Associated Imports and uses facts rather . . . creatively. He’s charming all the same. The hallmark on the 9s sandblast I’ve documented is a lower-case “l” for 1974, incidentally: Sweeney calls this special issue the “Hallmarked Silver Cap,” which to me seems rather vapid, although I'm not sure what I'd suggest in its place: "the 1906 Cap & Chain"? Attached windcaps wouldn't be reintroduced for five more years. On the page reproduced above the copy reads that the special issue is "a replica of a special pipe Charles Peterson created in his shop . . . in 1905." Of course we all know that shape 9 is a "special shape"—but then, aren't all Systems? But your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not CP was on Grafton Street in 1905 hand-carving a shape 9. In any event, in the 1978 Associated Imports catalog, Sweeney shortened the name to “Silver Cap” System: The advertising copy is a little wrenched here, but maybe that's what advertising is supposed to do. For one thing, Shape 9 appeared in the 1896 catalog, which isn’t really “long before the turn of the century.” And the silver cap and chain weren’t seen until the 1906 catalog. And of course, even the shape wasn’t, strictly speaking, the same shape 9, as fans of the 9BC and 2020 POY know. Advertising to one side, there’s a lot to celebrate here. K&P had only resumed their hallmarking five years' previous to this in 1969 and already they could see the benefit of doing so. And despite losing Harry Kapp in 1971, the creative minds at K&P (nearly…