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 THE DROPS
Smokingpipes.com:  Monday, December 15 (6:00pm ET)
Smokingpipes Europe: Monday, December 15 (Dublin, 10am / GMT+0)
(Per Federica Bruno: “There will be a small selection of 9mm available on SPE.”)
Dropping next week–Monday the 15th–are the 160^th  Peterson and 25^th Smokingpipes Anniversary pipes.  They will be sold separately in a series of 2400 numbered pipes for each shape, or as a cased set with matching numbers in a a series of 75.

Next Sunday we’ll dive into the available styles, finishes, and other details of the Pat B and Pat OB pipes, but before doing so I have something special to share with you: a visit with Sykes Wilford, Josh Burgess, and Glen Whelan from the Deansgrange factory about how the 160th Anniversary pipes came about and their importance as a milestone in the company’s history and Laudisi’s direction.

“2025 actually marks two anniversaries,” Josh Burgess at SPC told me.  “For K&P, it’s our 160th. For SPC, it’s the 25th. This release actually pays tribute to both. We wanted to revive the Pat B and Pat OB to commemorate Peterson’s anniversary, then do something special for SPC’s 25th as well, hence the two pipe sets that are exclusively available at Smokingpipes.”

ARRIVING AT THIS MOMENT

Putting on my journalist’s hat, I led off by asking what has led each of them to this moment? In other words, what’s the motivating force behind their work? In religious circles, I said, we call this vocation, from the Latin, vocare or “calling.”

Sykes, with the gleam that always comes into his eyes when talking about pipes, said when he was a kid Legos mesmerized him: “I’ve always loved to build things, and owning Peterson is like having the biggest Lego set in the world.” Being Sykes, this is to be understood on simultaneous levels. For the kid in him, there’s the love of just being in the factory and making things for himself. He’s spent a number of hours at the blasting cabinet, for example, can blast beauties like these:

System Sandblasts by Sykes

But he’s also talking about building Smokingpipes and Laudisi Enterprises, being part of the Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s, when the internet revolutionized the business world.  He was there with the best of them, either in his garage or a rented outbuilding (I don’t recall which), putting up what has become the world’s largest and most amazing pipes and tobacco online retailer.

“I bought Peterson,” Sykes says, “and knew I would pretty much from the moment I got the call from Conor Palmer in early 2018–because it needed buying. No one else would have. And in the very unlikely event someone else did, they’d have trashed it (like strip the brand out of the factory, close the factory, move production to Italy or China, trashed it). Whether it was a good business decision or not is a question I think we’re still answering. The fact that pipe factories, as businesses, are just fascinating is undeniable, but ultimately, I did it because it needed to be done and I had both the resources (barely) and the management and operational wherewithal to do it.”

In the 25 years that have passed since, the interest that fueled the start-up has matured into the responsibilities and requirements of an ever-growing business and the lives it impacts, making the whole thing much more sobering than it once was.  “Which is probably,” he grins, “why I find it so much fun to be able to just play around in the factory.”

Glen’s answer was no surprise.  His in-person ebullience can dispel the darkness of even the dourest thoughts. In an earlier time, he would doubtless have been among the hearty band of St. Kevin’s monks at Glendalough converting Ireland.  “The pipe industry,” he said, “has a way of drawing you in and holding you.  No two days are ever the same, and that’s doubly true now at Peterson, where things continue to evolve at a glorious pace.”

Josh surprised me. He is usually very left brain, able to articulate lines of reason in the way my best professors were in college. This time he just skipped to the end, “Do you know George Herbert’s poem ‘The Elixir’? That’s my  answer.” “Of course,” I said, remembering to write it down and go home and see if I’d read that far in my Wilcox English Poems of George Herbert.  I hadn’t.  Here it is:

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
To do it as for Thee.

Not rudely, as a beast,
To runne into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.

A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.

All may of Thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for Thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgerie divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for lesse be told. (pp. 640-41)

There’s a way, I thought afterwards, in which Herbert’s answer pretty much stands for all three men. That explains a lot.

THE BENCHMARK

Returning to the pipes—as I’d spied several silver capped examples and a beautiful little dark case that said “Peterson’s 160^th Anniversary” on it—we began to discuss the challenges of creating the set.

If you’re scratching your head thinking to yourself “just another fun Peterson release,” read on and scratch no longer.  “Institutional knowledge,” Sykes said, “is something that can grow and then be disrupted when ownership and ways of thinking change, especially in the pre-digital age.”  If you’ve never thought about that term, neither had I.  Cypher Learning defines it as “the collective understanding, skills, and experience an organization builds over time, including its unwritten rules, historical context, and best practices. It is crucial for efficiency, problem-solving, and decision-making, and exists in both easily documented forms (like manuals) and in the hands of experienced employees.”

Now here’s the rub: beginning with the Laudisi Era, everything is digitally documented and carried forward.  Before then? Not so much.  It was mostly passed in that “laying on of hands” in the factory by experienced employees that I’ve gone on about in the book and on the blog whereby a senior craftsman models and instructs how something is done.  Change in that model is slow, often deliberate, and continuity is preserved. Unless—

–unless there’s a major disruption. Think a world war, a Pipeocolypse, a paradigm shift in management and / or ownership.  All of these have happened to Kapp & Peterson, not to mention navigating all the internal national problems the company has experienced.  The Great War? Shortage of materials. World War II? Blockades and shortage of materials. Politics? Huge tariffs imposed by the British government on Irish products in the 1930s. Pipeocalypse? Mid-1980s when the world quit pipe smoking and K&P lost 3/4ths of its personnel and all its bowl-turning employees and equipment.  Paradigm shifts in management? There are probably more, but the years 1881, 1893, 1919, 1974, 1982, 1984, 1991, and 2018 come immediately to mind. The biggest, of course, happened after Harry Kapp retired and the company underwent spells when its owners had absolutely no experience in pipe making.

While the business model of the Dublin Era (1990-2018) saved and strengthened a company that was struggling, when Laudisi acquired Peterson, it was immediately apparent that different paradigms needed to be put into place for it to survive.  This meant restructuring the work flow and management using Laudisi’s global experience of how pipe makers and factories work and not merely survive but thrive.

Foundational changes had to be made and put in the correct order to facilitate later projects  so that now, 7 ½ years on, the 160^th Anniversary set can be what it is.  Such bottom-up restructuring, said Sykes, takes years.  “I ripped out all of the business processes and rebuilt them around software I designed (and wrote most of myself), while Josh restructured the management and worked to refurbish and replace the machinery with Gabriele dal Fiume, and Tracy rebuilt the accounting and finance pieces (and we injected massive amounts of capital).”

Stems

If this sounds abstract, consider concrete examples from the 160^th set.  As Glen explains, any pipe’s design begins with the stem. Unlike artisans, who carve the bowl first and then follow it with a stem, Peterson and other factories must work the other way around: they either must have an adaptable stem stock on hand or get a new one made.  And that’s what happened here. Getting a new mold for a ebonite stem is spendy, involving CAD designs that go from factory to outsourcer and back again several times.  To get one that will work  precisely for the 1906 Patent replica took months.

“The stems,” says Josh, “are actually so meaty that bending them proved quite challenging; it takes a lot of time in the bending oven to get that much vulcanite bendable. I wonder how they did it in the old days. The stem bend doesn’t exactly match the original, but it’s pretty close.” And I would add, after spending hours pouring over the 1906 catalog, that it’s Giacomo’s observation of the Golden Ratio that makes for the finest examples of Peterson’s work and is also seen so tellingly in many of his own pipes.

“Do you remember when you came over in 2019 and asked about making a two pipe set?” Josh asked me.  Indeed I did, little comprehending what was involved.  “Well,” he continued, “it wasn’t even possible until this year.”  Even then, there were complex logistics.  The stems, for example, said Sykes, could only be made at the rate of 400 a month.  Hmm: 2400 + 150 + breakage, etc. in production. That’s 6 ½ to 7 months after the design and mold were completed.

Bowls

Then there’s the bowl. Peterson hired Giacomo Penzo (see Post # 199) as Pipe Specialist early in 2019. An artisan pipe maker with a degree in industrial design from Università Iuav di Venezia, he’s one of those amazing right brain / left brain kind of guys who can approach, design, and discuss something from aesthetic as well as scientific-mathematical viewpoints. Sykes said Giaco’s learning curve as the company’s Pipe Specialist has matched the company’s own evolution. We on the hobby side, of course, have been able to watch this growth with each new release. But this one? This one is the new benchmark.

Shapes

The 2013 Antique Collection: Not the Same

So how about the shapes themselves—how were they chosen? Pete Geeks of long-standing will remember the 2013 Antique Collection (see Post#11). As the fourth and final installment of the Dublin Era’s Antique sets, they featured vulcanite P-Lip stems, but non-graduated bores. As you can imagine, this was a bit of a letdown for some Pete Geeks.  Overall, they were shorter and lighter, placing them quite definitely in the nose warmer class, and without the engineering of the “P.P.P.”—Peterson’s Patent Pipes—of the originals, fun but not all some of us hoped they might be. As it turns out, they also had no bearing on the selection of this year’s 160^th Anniversary shapes.

I think copy at Laudisi has it right when it says, “artisan pipe maker and in-house Pipe Specialist Giacomo Penzo has reimagined each form for the modern era while preserving the character of their original designs.”  James Walsh CPG remarked to me that Giacomo’s designs are “more elegant than the originals—and that’s a compliment.”  They are quite close in size to the letterpress halftones of the catalog, perhaps just a bit larger depending on which 1906 version one looks at. Additionally–at least for me–the Anniversary shapes project K&P’s iconic design language, which combines the curves of the Golden Spiral with the thick muscularity found in shapes like the original John Bull 999, 9BC and 14B.

To return to 2013, that was also the year Josh Burgess came to Smokingpipes.com, not too long after completing a Ph.D. in history at the Univ. of Southern Carolina. When Laudisi acquired Peterson, it was Josh who went over as Managing Director and to direct Smokingpipes.eu (seePost #183).

Josh, let me say parenthetically, was Peterson’s first dedicated Managing Director who was also pipe smoker since Tony Dempsey back in the Late Republic era.  Think about how important this is to the craft of making pipes—not just the business of making them, but the smoking of pipes.  And of course, Glen Whelan is now Peterson’s second Managing Director and dedicated pipe smoker after Dempsey (see Post #169).

From the 1906 catalog

To continue.  Josh walked into his new office at the Sallynoggin factory in 2018 and after a few days thought it would be nice to put something on the walls.  “At some stage, Conor Palmer (the former acting Managing Director) had commissioned some reproductions of a few pages from the 1906 catalogue, and we seemed to have a surplus of them floating around the office.” And every day he’d walk into the office, look at that page and think, “Hmm, those Pats would sure make a nice set!”

But a set of pipes wasn’t something Laudisi wanted to undertake until everything else was in place. That “everything” has arrived.  “Everyone was involved,” Glen said, “in this historic set, from its earliest stages through developing and finishing, creating a lot of excitement for us.”  “It’s a defining moment in the company’s history,” Josh Burgess said, “so we’re all really proud of what we’ve accomplished.”

Many thanks to
Sykes Wilford, Josh Burgess, & Glen Whelan,
to Laudisi’s Andy Wike & his great team of photographers for media materials,
and to Lance Dahl.

My principal when I was a teacher always used to say to me, “Document, document, document.”  It’s a lesson for historians as well as teachers of recalcitrant children.  Today’s lesson is simple: look at this awesome Irish glass Peterson Christmas ornament from Smokingpipes.Eu!  Our Christmas tree, unadorned (mostly) here in Advent but standing silently in the Great Room, is whispering to me, “Mark, Mark, where’s my Peterson Christmas ornament? I need that ornament!” I’m trying not to listen to it.  I’m failing.

Lance Dahl CPG recently shared these photos of a 9S, HM 1906:

Nevatitude’s Shop Corner. I could spend some considerable time here:

THERE’S  STILL  TIME!
You just have time to order your PPN Christmas Ornament
for the PG Christmas Event–here’s the form:

GOOGLE FORM FOR CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT

There’s also just a few tintackers left, which you can order here:

GOOGLE FORM FOR TINTACKER

Pete Prior’s full cabinet shows off the tintacker to considerable effect: