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PSA
Last Chance to Order the PPN 309 System Spigot Commemorative
and Companion Zippo Sterling Armor 10th Anniversary Lighter

Tomorrow at 12 noon CDT I’ll close up the Google Form for the 309 System Spigot Commemorative and send on our orders to Kapp & Peterson.  Gigi thought you might like to know the breakdown:

There were 40 slots available for the smooth pipe. The form went up at 12:01am last Sunday and we had 123 requests by morning coffee (!), when Gigi closed the form.  The good news here is that several Pete Geeks were willing to move over to sandblast if smooth was no longer available.  Thirty-five Pete Geeks said they didn’t want a pipe if they couldn’t get a smooth.

After adjusting for those who were willing to move over to sandblast, we came up with the following numbers:

038 smooth w/ condenser       + 02 smooth w/9mm =            040
121 sandblast w/ condenser    + 05 sandblast w/9mm=         126

So 166 pipes total, before whatever requests come in through tomorrow at noon. I believe this is the most we’ve ever ordered, and my thanks to all who participated and especially to all who said they’d go for a sandblast if the smooths were gone. If this is your first Pete Geek event, remember to send me a photo when you receive your pipe to get your Certified Pete Geek certificate. If you’re already a CPG, the Merit Badge will be added to your existing certificate.

If you decide you want a sandblast, you can still order here: SANDBLAST PPN 309 SYSTEM SPIGOT.

The numbers on the Sterling Armor Zippo have exceeded my expectations–we’re up to 25 this morning. What I found with the last year’s Pete Geek Zippo has held true here as well–there are a lot of pipemen who collect or companion Zippos.  PayPal invoices will be sent out on Monday (I think). Gigi wants to give those who ordered a couple of days to respond, then she’ll place the order.

If you decide you want one, you can order here: PPN ZIPPO 10TH ANNIVERSARY LIGHTER.

This morning I want to introduce you to a fellow Pete Geek from the UK., Clint Stacey.  He and I struck up a friendship through the blog a few years ago that is based not only on Peterson, but our shared background as English teachers and interests in classic movies, Sherlock Holmes, detective novels & many other things.  His friendship, like all the best ones, has grown slowly and steadily and become a haven for me.  When he told me about his family’s trip to Madrid and a stop at R. Moreu’s last summer, I asked him if he would share not only his trip, but his journey as a pipeman. 

THOUGHTS ON PEACE, COMFORT, & PETERSON

A vintage English-made 309 stamped “Capt. Smith Liverpool”—Smith, of course, was the captain of the Titanic,

I suppose I am interested in pipes through my reading interests Conan Doyle, Lewis, Twain and vintage detective fiction, which are all awash with people settling down before fires with pipes. I bought my first pipe, a Peterson, about 1996. I think I went for the Peterson because of the Irish connection ( my mother’s family are from Southern Ireland, my football team idols in the 1970s were Irish and I grew up with a love of Irish literature and music).

View in Clint’s Sanctuary–I love the Royal Dalton SH Toby Mug in the front, at the right.

The other thing I liked was the silver band and being able to date pipes. (I was yet to learn what a mine field this was to be!) After that first purchase it was a number of years before I bought a new pipe again. Flea markets and car boots were a really good source for pipes and I bought anything that was cheap. I didn’t really know what I was doing and hate to think of what I might have left behind at times. Because of eBay those days of finding pipes have largely gone, but I keep looking. I really enjoy finding a pipe in a mess and cleaning it up—I’ve learnt a lot from Steve Laug at Reborn Pipes  and he has been mightily generous with his time at various points.

The Petes next to the Jeremy Brett 124 Churchwarden are London-made—”an odd quirk, mine, drawn to the Irish then having a penchant for their English-mades!”

The turning point from normal human into a Pete Geek wasn’t a certain type of moon but The Peterson Pipe Book and Peterson Pipe Notes, which I happened upon about the same time. The more I learn the more the fascination has grown as have the connections. Around the same time I became really interested in various explorers and travelers, particularly Tom Crean. I finally after many years visited Ireland a couple of years ago, and it was great to visit both Petersons as well as Crean’s pub.

Gerald – a stuffed Pike from 1901 – He sees everything but says nothing

I’m interested (mainly through literature) in the history of Ireland which in modern times is reflected in some of the Peterson stamping of pipes—I have an interest in Dracula (both written and on screen), the Basil Rathbone films of Sherlock Holmes have been real favourites since a child, and Halloween (which occurs on my birthday) is a big deal for us here—so it seems a lot of my other interests and passions have a Peterson Pipe link to them.

I met my wife, who was born in Spain, about twenty years ago now. She had come to the UK with her parents when she was about twelve and stayed, going to University here. I met her in a school and it was love at first sight on my part! Oddly, I visited (or pursued) her to Madrid the first summer after meeting her and stayed just around the corner from R. Moreu’s pipe shop, but didn’t realise it was there. Maybe I had other things on my mind? Later on she did once say to me as we passed a man smoking a pipe, “That man was smoking a Peterson!” and then said, “I really shouldn’t know that!”

The rare Peterson Pipes shop sign. These hung outside a tobacconist’s or inside behind a counter.
They have been found in both Europe and America and measure about 4 feet in length.

I terms of collecting or having stewardship of Petes, I’m quite fascinated by the Irish Free State era and pipes in their cases from the Patent era, but of course they are things everyone else are eagerly hunting for.  I also like the “stuff around the pipes” like the tins and postcards and of course the large wooden shop sign that Mark encouraged me with a few years back and which I have to say is one of my most favourite things I own.

Among the fascinating items here, note the Thinking Man postcard, which dates from the 1940s.

I suppose overall I like what pipes and pipe smoking represent in terms of peace, gentility and a more civilized world.  I read somewhere of how an estate pipe makes us think of the owner smoking in times of pleasure or how the pipe might have brought comfort in more difficult times.

A pipe painted by my friend Abbe

MY VISIT TO R. MOREU OF MADRID

We were able to revisit Madrid over the summer, and for the first time, Mr. Moreu was in his shop (previously I had dealt with his daughter).  Apparently, the last time Peterson changed hands he was offered a load of stock, so effectively most of his Petersons are new/old stock which he’s been selling for the last ten years or so. I imagine when PG Chris Mendoza went there were even more treasures, as each time I have gone more has been sold.

He had a really nice HANDMADE House Pipe that I fancied but he also had a Sherlock Holmes rack and as these seemed to have dried up completely in the UK, I thought it might time to finally get this. Apparently though he wasn’t keen to let this go and a great deal of conversation in Spanish took place between him and my wife (who is very charming) and he relented and let me have it. It then left me with an issue of which pipe, as I had now weakened my budget.

Last time I managed to get a Writer’s Collection box from him. Mr. Moreu had a Rivers Collection box with two pipes remaining in but told my wife that “every time I let a box go it is like a pinch to my heart” ( I know how he feels!). I did think if there had been one Rivers  pipe left and the box was available I would have gone for it, but as that didn’t seem on the table I looked at his other really nice pipes trying to decide.

In the background as I was thinking there was much conversation between Mr. Moreu and my wife and then suddenly she said, “he says if you take one Rivers pipe you can have the box with it!”

I’m still not sure what happened—and maybe Mr. Moreu isn’t either—but I left with a Rivers Collection Boyne, Rivers Collection box and a Sherlock Holmes Rack.

Not the exact Rivers Collection Boyne Clint bought, but just to refresh your memory that this is an awesome straight rhodesian, one of what? Two or three in the entire catalog?

I think the chance of finding any of the boxes from the old collections is remote—unless they come with all the pipes and then you have that huge cost. I think slowly over the next few years putting the Rivers Collection together will be a lot of fun and having the original box will make it that bit nicer.

Mark: I just hate it when someone goes to R. Moreu. Look at the middle Peterson cassette, second row, far right (rectangular box around it): it’s my holy grail pipe of the past  few years, the Moran from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Collection. And there it lies! And Mr. Moreu doesn’t do internet sales. *Sob.* (Remember that on our last visit to R. Moreu it was an ebony 309 that had me calling for the Waaambulance.)  Still, if you’ve seen a Moran or have one to sell, let me know.

The Adventures of SH Moran

The Boyne (yes, thank you Mark for sharing your obsession) is also a lovely pipe. I went over soon after returning from Madrid to a local  town which has a cigar shop that stocks some pipe tobacco picked something appropriate. I then got the X Pipe book out and found a suitable blessing for it.

The shop was great and staff really lovely.  There were many other pipes but naturally I wasn’t interested in these! I am not sure how things are with you in the States generally but we no longer have any shops like this in the UK. Twenty years ago most towns had a proper tobacconists—similar to those that you would see in the Basil Rathbone films. I remember as a kid newsagents with a full tobacconists area with a range of tobaccos and pipes and maybe twenty / thirty different children’s comics each week and in the summer large freezers that you could dive in that had about thirty different types of ice cream. Now the tobacconists have gone, children’s comics are largely a thing of the past and most places have about five or six different ice creams—progress seems to be less fun and less choice. I often wonder what happened to a lot of the furniture, fittings, jars etc. from these tobacconists  – you really see any of that type of stuff for sale despite the big market in vintage smoking related items.

Jason Canady, CPG: This is an XL339s Ebony Spigot I picked up on eBay a few weeks ago, hallmarked 1989.  The my only Ebony and came from a small place called Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia—there’s only 500 people there so it has cool Providence. It’s incredibly light and smokes quite excellent.

Mark: Wow, this really takes me back. Super, super cool. This “F” or “Facing Mount” version with the shouldered (“S”) army mount was the first spigot design of the  Larrigan / Nicholson / Dempsey team (right before the beaded version with the domed ferrule) and to get it in the XL339 Ebony. I’ve always longed to see it on a System as a System Spigot. The Ebony was quite new at the time, and actually debuted several months before Dunhill’s Dress Black. I know people cavil against the Pete finish & rave about the Dunhill. Let ’em.  I love my Ebony Petes–smooth or blast. I’d love ’em in Rustic, too!

Matthew Ramsey, CPG.  I was disappointed that the smooth PPNs were already gone when you acknowledged my request, as I was getting caught up in the excitement- even wanted to expand my order- but the approach taken by Laudisi of only offering 40 smooths has helped me to pause and step back. I miss the days where you could reach out to your favorite tobacconist and ask them to put your name down for the next year’s POY offering -with the high end being smooth, just smooth…  The hype that is manufactured now with the different special finishes “only available in a small handful” is certainly more than a nod to collectors, which you know I lean toward, and yet am so grateful my personal interest in the anniversary pipes ended in 2016 with the birth of my 3rd kiddo.  I hadn’t meant to turn this into a rant, but it’s frustrating.

Mark: It’s not a rant, or if it is I share it because you strike a chord I’ve often felt myself.  Historically, this whole thing’s a double-edged sword. I can’t tell you how many times before the dawn of internet shopping I’d go into the local B&M shop and then have to spend an hour or more deciding on “the lesser of two weevils,” as Jack Aubrey says—or even the lesser of four or five evils—because the shop never, ever had what I was hoping to get. It was always a matter of just settling for what they had. Now we’re at the other extreme, sort of.  The problem now is that we’ve got feeding frenzies with 3 Olympic medalists and everyone else a loser when high grades or rare shapes appear.  I got an email about some tobacco I really wanted this morning—having been waiting to reappear for over a year.  The email was timestamped 2 minutes before I opened it.  I tried.  And tried.  And tried. And tried.  And finally got to the checkout–and it was gone.  The tobacco situation, or at least, the blends I’m drawn to, seems to be even worse worse than the pipe situation.  So I try to be content the pipes I have (“there’s ALWAYS another pipe” is how the late Chuck Wright would console me), be grateful for the pipes that come my way, and cultivate a palate that’s interested in tins I can at least find with some regularity.

This year’s PPN pipe offering is symptomatic of  this whole situation. I was ecstatic to get even 40 smooths.  But I’ve answered at least a dozen emails from disappointed PGs, which makes me think I’ve not served our tiny community well.  I was hoping just for once to offer something that truly was at least a mid-high grade smooth, an Iora, Barley or PSB.  Of course, I don’t know the business side of the story, and I can respect that privacy.  Those folk have to make their house payment or rent and I’m sure at the end of the day they see pipes more like widgets sold than the sacred vessels “smoaked” (sic) that many of us do.  As a Christian, I don’t believe in the ethics nor the ethos of the scarcity paradigm, yet that’s how capitalism seduces us to live on an hourly basis. There are, however, still strong models for abundant life and the “abundancy” paradigm. Our Petes, tobacco and fellowship can facilitate such ways of living if we mind how we go. There now—that’s my rant! LOL.

Eric B., CPG: Mark, do you know the backstory on how Peterson sources/produces a discontinued bowl shape?

Mark: Some of it. Peterson, like Dunhill and others, doesn’t have much in the way of cultural artifacts—viz., old pipes.  They have quite a few gifts (like Charles Peterson’s famous pipe, pipes he owned donated by his daughter Soldie’s goddaughters, and those donated by Paddy Larrigan, sold to them by the late Jim Lilley and so forth).  When they create a shape for the POY, they either have to ask an outside vendor or, since Giacomo Penzo came on board, ask him to recreate it with the aid of catalogs and a physical specimen if possible. I know they did this on both the 4AB and the X160.  Their “John Bull” POY in 2019 wasn’t really the JB 999 at all, but a super-rarity stamped “XL991” and based on the later, smaller 999.  Giacomo Penzo’s 9BC, as discussed extensively in earlier posts, was taken from the Patent-era 9 Charles Peterson designed, by the Éire era was being displaced by a bolder, chubbier 9 that would become the XL307 / 9 from that point forward.  Of course, Penzo’s version has tiny variations, perhaps inevitable with an artisan but also having to do with the stems that could be sourced at the time. His 9 in any case is a thing of beauty. His shape 4 (our 309 Spigot System and the 4AB), is so close to being a dead ringer that I can’t say I can tell the difference.

Now, once their design team approves a shape (and that can involve several of the guys), then the shape is ready to be sent out to be duplicated on a frazing machine. Except that, with the POY 2024 for the first time they used their own bowl turning equipment (I think). That makes it (almost) the first in-house bowl turned since they lost 80% of their factory and all their bowl turning department in the mid-1980s (I think they’ve also done a few B42s in the older apple shape). Anyway, you can kinda see all this when you hold that POY2024: it’s just so perfect. G. Penzo + in-house bowl turning = Peterson perfection, right?

Nate Lynn, CPG.  After much rumination I settled on this 314 Sculpted System as a perfect companion for Strider. MY first instinct was to go with a demi warden, as that’s what I always pictured in my head, but since his pipe is curiously carved, and he’s always on the go a 314 just makes sense. It’s small, easily broken down, and can fit in a pocket quite comfortably.

Gary Hamilton, CPG.  In reflection of J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle Earth, I present my interpretation of the pipe’s that were companioned by the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring. One can only surmise that the humidor is full of some of the finest leaf from the Southfarthing.