268. The Making of PETERSON’S PATENT PIPES: A FACSIMILE OF THE 1896 CATALOG
My publisher has told me over and over again that while books on pipes don’t sell, pipe catalogs really don’t sell. With no advertising, no reviews and no Chicago Pipe Show book launch, I thought it might be a good idea to at least let my fellow Pete Geeks know what went into the making of Peterson’s Patent Pipes and why I think it’s an important book to accompany their love of all things Peterson. I realize that most pipe smokers would rather spend their limited income on pipes or tobacco than books. Be that as it may, the true Pete Geek is usually (not always) interested enough in the history of his favorite pipe to invest in learning about its history, even at the cost of a few tins of tobacco. Before I begin, let me assure those who are afraid this post may spoil the rich drama and adrenaline rush of the catalog that there are almost no plot spoilers. Page 35 from the partial catalog in circulation in the 1990s, pages of which found their way to the internet c. 2003 The story of the digital restoration actually began well before formal work on The Peterson Pipe, probably in the late 1990s, when a few scans of the 1896 catalog began circulating on the internet. The serious CPGs, of course, downloaded those immediately for future reference. The advanced collectors—or at least a dozen or so of them—had bought photocopy reproductions of a mostly complete catalog from a collector who is no longer a Peterson collector in the latter part of the 1990s. Then there were those especially fortunate souls who owned small poster versions of single pages from the 1896 catalog like “The Strong Man,” the cutaway demonstrator, and the “Cleaning and Filling” page, all seemingly circulated by K&P back in the 1970s or 80s, verifying that at one time K&P had a copy of the lost catalog. At that time, everyone agreed that K&P didn’t have shape numbers for their pipes in the 1896 catalog and we would never know what those shapes were. Fast forward to 2012, when it became immediately apparent to me that there could really be no Peterson book without high-quality images from the first catalogs. One of the reasons the book took so long was because the research and the writing went in a sequential fashion, like driving a car until it runs out of gas then pushing the vehicle to the next gas station to refuel before setting out again. One of the advertisers in the back of the catalog was Kryiazi Frères, who exported Egyptian cigarettes to Great Britain. Unbeknownst to most today, cigarettes at the time covered a broad flavor spectrum not unlike pipe tobacco today and many who smoked them did not inhale. Those who did inhale were nicknamed “gaspers.” It was on one of the “push the car” days when I was researching K&P clays that I found, by pure chance (or grace) the National Pipe…