238. Documenting A Late Patent / Irish Free State DeLuxe Billiard
I recently had the opportunity to acquire a handful of what look to be interesting Petes, this little billiard among them. Looking through the available catalogs and brochures, the first pipe it resembles is from the Kapet line, the R14 shape found in the Philipp Weiss & Söhne tri-fold from c. 1925: The illustrations on the tri-fold are not printed at scale (nor are there scale indicators) and can make shapes like this difficult to ascertain with any certainty. Fast forward to the 1937 catalog and there it is: a dead-ringer, thanks to the catalog being printed at scale: For the “K” and 1st Quality lines, the shape bears the 1073 number, while for the Kapet & De Luxe it’s shape 400. As you cans see in this montage from the pages of the 1937 catalog, the De Luxe featured a “rich dark color” and a “special bone extension” as well as “Hand cut para-vulcanite mouthpiece.” I can testify to the quality of the vulcanite—it’s in better condition than some of the Petes in my rack that are only 10 or 20 years old. The long, thin tenon extension is cross-vented at 120° and comes right up to the airhole entering the bowl’s chamber. The design language here is full-on K&P, as the shank has to house a formidable tenon. The button is thick—6.2 mm—but I’d have to say it’s totally worth it for the graceful, gorgeous converging angles of the shank and stem. The rim of the bowl is canted forward just a few degrees, creating a dynamism with the back-flow of the shank’s top line. I also love the forward curve at the base of the bowl, which begins exactly at the dead-center of the bowl. Although shape 400 doesn’t appear after the 1937 catalog, it was obviously made for a few years afterwards. And the fact that it isn’t seen in the 1906 catalog doesn’t mean it wasn’t in production shortly thereafter. What is interesting is that there is no country of manufacture stamp. On straight round shank K&Ps these could occur on the bottom at the end of the shank or on the reverse side (on oval shanks, the stamp would be on the bottom in the middle of the shank). Normally when a K&P has no country of manufacture stamp and it’s this old, I would date it during the final years of what we call the Patent era—really after the Patent expired in 1912 but before the Irish Free State era. The IFS stamp seems to have come into use almost simultaneously with the change in national identity, while K&Ps before that time never had country of manufacture stamps. 1 While I don’t offer it as conclusive evidence, K&P’s “Chip of the Old Block” poster from 1917—the first ephemera we have for the DeLuxe line—does seem to illustration both shape 400 and the type of stamp used on the De Luxe. Of course, this stamp may have been used up through 1940 as well.…