524. Organic Peterson Shape Evolution w/ Reference to Shape 14 / 308 / 358

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I have a good friend on the east coast and a few years ago he started the What Me Worry? Philosophy & Brown Water Society. We meet every week or so to discuss Peterson pipes and the meaning of life, and during a recent meeting he opened a drawer in his shop looking for something but discovered instead a box with several vintage Petes he’d forgotten about.

He held them up one after another for us to analyze and then got to one that I’d seen in an early K&P brochure. I became so effusive about it that—this being his generous nature—he said we’d make a trade. I feebly tried to explain I have nothing that would be of interest–he being a genuine collector and me being a quotidian kind of smoker-collector. But it was too late and the pipe arrived three days later.

This post is an interest payment on that future trade, not only because I was thrilled to get this System but because Shape 14 / 308 / 358 is one of the most instructive shapes we can look at to understand how shapes evolve in the Peterson catalog.

At some point in the next month or two I want to share two new DIY tools I used to restore the gift pipe, but for this morning I’ve got enough to do to talk about (1) how and why shapes evolve at Peterson, (2) recount the importance of the Golden Ratio in Charles Peterson’s design language, and (3) demonstrate the organic evolution of the 14 / 308 / 358.

(1)
HOW AND WHY SHAPES EVOLVE AT PETERSON

If we count back to 1890, there’s been 136 years of shape changes. What does that mean, and how does that happen? For me, there’s a deep delight in exploring the catalog and discovering changes in a shape and often following out those changes—if I can find them—to add to my rotation.

I asked Glen Whelan, Managing Director at Peterson, how and why a shape changes, and I encourage you to copy his answer down somewhere:

“There are three reasons for shapes to change,” he writes. “[1] organic evolution in shaping during production; [2] changes driven by previous stummel suppliers (thankfully no longer an issue); and [3] changes we undertake in order to make a better pipe. This could be something along the lines of adding a steeper bend to better accommodate a System reservoir or refining a shape to just plain and simply make the pipe look nicer.”

In earlier posts, we’ve looked out how the B42 / Darwin evolved, why the 05 System changed, and discovered there were no less than three different Gregson Adventures of Sherlock Holmes shape (2004 POY, 2008 POY, and 2011 Gregson). We’ve also looked at why the 120 Dublin changed.

This morning we’re concerned only with Glen’s first rationale for change: organic evolution. As I said at the outset, Shape 14 offers a unique opportunity to see this at work. To appreciate what we see, however, we need to remind ourselves of the Golden Ratio as the baseline for Charles Peterson’s design language and hence the System chart.

(2)
REVISITING THE GOLDEN RATIO

The Golden Ratio at work in Giacomo Penzo’s 2022 14B POY

The Golden Ratio is a mathematical proportion where the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one (1.618). It appears in nature in shell curves, pinecones, and sunflower seeds, and artists and architects use it to create organic, aesthetically pleasing compositions.

You can see it at work in Giacomo Penzo’s original design for the POY 2024 if you put your attention on the smallest part of the spiral and allow your eye to flow naturally flow around the lines of the rest of the image:

You can flip or turn the spiral any way you please, the direction it heads isn’t important, it’s the shape and the distance between the loops that matters. The wear gap—which we go on about—is short enough that the eye skips right over it. The P-Lip button contributes, when seen from the side and from the top and bottom. Giacomo fully realizes here the charge he was given at the outset: create a Peterson shape that is iconically a Peterson shape.

When the eye stops and can’t make sense of what it sees, you’ve found disruption of the GR, which could be a source of interest or merely an irritation showing poor design. Here’s four examples of the 9BC that are instructive in this regard:

9BC POY 2020

In Giacomo Penzo’s recreation of the classic 9BC, notice he faithfully follows the GR. There’s no abrupt changes in the curves or in the convergence of the outer lines.

9BC EARLY REPUBLIC

The original 9BC, as released through Rogers Imports Ltd. as early as the Eire era, is seen here. The line of convergence from the shank down to the stem bend is graceful, then very quickly turns into the button. It’s not really a problem, but visually it slows down the eye.

9BC SHAMROCK EARLY REPUBLIC

The visually longer shank + stem and abrupt turn before the button violates the GR, exacerbated by the fact that the button and upper part of the stem have been sanded by the restorationist and flattened to remove dental chatter.

9bc SUPREME EARLY REPUBLIC

The sharp bend from the upper shank to the button is almost clear break in the GR, but to my eye turns out to be merely a point of interest because the lines of the stem converge so nicely.

The GR is a helpful tool in assessing your own response to any given “curvy” pipe simply because human beings are hardwired to understand beauty in large part through this lens. While faces, female forms, and fishing boats don’t offer pure examples of the GR, we have instinctively used it throughout history in assessing the proportions of these and other things we see to determine whether we find them pleasing or beautiful.

(3)
THE EVOLUTION OF SHAPE 14

The Patent Shape 14 is a very beautiful example of the GR, as we saw in Post #297.** While there has been a great deal of change in the long history of the System pipe, I would argue pipe smokers should still spot a Peterson from across the room not merely because of its bend and silverwork, but because it embodies the Golden Ratio. To show the historical changes as clearly as possible, I use the 14A (army mount) wherever possible.

1896 Patent 14B

An original Patent System, shape 14 made its appearance as one of the “Ball” shapes in the 1896 catalog. Bear in mind it could very well have been in production since 1890 or even a few years previous to that (and if you have a Patent 1890 – 1895 14A, please let everyone know in the comments below). As the baseline of our evolutionary journey, notice its extreme cheeking (curviness), especially how it curves into the rim. Notice also the differences between this Patent stem bend and what comes later. To bend a stem like this–as I found restoring the gift 308 my buddy sent me–heat has to be applied almost at the tenon and is more time consuming than bends further up the stem. But ain’t it beautiful?

MT Boyhood Museum Shape 14B, 1898 button

The Patent 14 is seen in some of the famous photos of Mark Twain. The lads from Dublin actually visited the sleepy town of Hannibal, Missouri to measure this torched specimen, donated to the Boyhood Museum by Twain’s daughter Suzy (despite it being in their copies of the1906 catalog). I’ve adjusted the tone of the curator’s photograph to allow a better view of the pipe, but it’s still quite obviously the same pipe we see in the 1896 catalog: follow the curve up the shank to the mount on each.

1906 Patent 14B

Changing the mounting style (and there was no visual for the 14A in the 1896 catalog) shifts our visual focus, as does changing illustrators. Has there been a change? I can’t be sure.

1906 Patent 14AB

Pictured here is a 14AB, HM 1906, from the Ken Sigel collection. This adds nuance to our understanding since it’s a three-dimensional example. Comparing it with the Boyhood Home 14 and the 1896 14, something seems to have changed. Has the shank angle relaxed 5 degrees? You can see this more dramatically in the Irish Free State illustration from c. 1925:

1925 IFS 14A

This is the illustration that fired in my head when I saw the 14A my friend held up at philosophy club. Compare it with the 1906 and you may say, “Oh, the 1925 illustrator copied the 1906 catalog.” Could be but notice how how much heavier these two appear than the 1896 and Boyhood Home 14s. They’re almost like the bottom half of a donut. The shank bend doesn’t seem quite as steep, the bowl not quite as tall, the whole shape seems to have sort of relaxed down to that day-old-donut look that is so inviting when we wake up the morning after and can’t find anything but half a can of sardines in the frig.

Philosophy Club Eire 308 “0”

See how much this resembles the 1925 illustration? It is simply not the same as the 1906.

1937

The 1937 catalog is the first time in the ephemera we see the “300” numbers. By my reckoning, this is the third version we’ve encountered of the 14 / 308 / 358, and here we’ll remain for quite a while. Why all the confusion?” you ask me. “Well, here’s the thing,” I reply: “in the 1937 catalog, K&P had five regular grades—Deluxe, First Quality, 0 Grade, 2^nd Grade, and 3^rd Grade. Take a look, as they were running three grades with sterling back then:

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page:

There were five briar grades and the upper three could be had in any mount you wanted;
there were three shape numbers for any given System bowl:
the 14 was for DeLuxe, First Quality, and 0 Grade;
the 308 as for 2^nd Grade;
the 358 was for 3^rd Grade;
only the 358 was a nickel mount.

308 and 358 from the 1937 catalog

The 1937 14 / 308 is a far cry from those 1896 and 1906. It also looks quite a bit different from the 308 Gift pipe, except when I took this photo of the Gift 308:

What’s going on here? Who’s playing tricks on me? Look at this illustration from the 1939 Rogers Imports Ltd. catalog:

Looks just like the 1937 catalog and my Gift 308 above, doesn’t it? But not like the 1925 and 1906 day-old-donut shapes. It begins to look like the 308 from the Early Republic, which we’ll get to in a moment.

There’s a question here of when the 308 went from sterling to nickel-mount. Calling William of Ockham and his razor in service, here’s what I believe happened:

When the 358 disappeared, the System line was reorganized into something like what we have now. The DeLuxe 14, S or B mount at the top, followed by the 308 as Premier in sterling or 308 as Standard in nickel.

The question then, is when did the 358 disappear? I’m thinking The Emergency may have brought all this about—what people outside Ireland called WW2.

Off the shores of Ireland, an Allied destroyer attempting to protect shipping from a German U-Boat

While The Emergency lasted from 1939-1945, as far as pipemen are concerned, the dates were 1941 to 1948, that is, the period when there was a disastrous shortage of briar. This era deserves its own book (Gene Umberger, I think you could write it). You can get an overview of by making an AI query, “How did briar for pipe making reach the Allies in WW2?”

The war didn’t kill Peterson—which was something of a miracle, considering Ireland was blockaded for nearly the entire war and K&P’s St. Stephens Green factory didn’t have access to briar for those years. They kept everyone working, even at reduced hours although how that was possible we probably can’t fathom from our 21^st century ethos human “resources.” There was only one slim catalog issued during that period, illustrating only three System shapes: the 11, 13 and 14. (Although it did show this year’s PPN POY!).

1955

Early Republic Standard 308 (left) and Premier (right)

The 14 / 308 was discontinued in the late 1950s, as documented in the page above from the c. 1955 catalog. It looks exactly like the the 1937 and 1939. And when I look at my own Early Republic 308s, they’re a match.

Mark Twain Commemorative (1981-85) 14B

So the 14 / 308 languished for twenty years, brought back not by shape number but as the Mark Twain commemorative in 1981, replete with a B stem, something most of us at the time didn’t even remember, so short was our memory and so scanty our information. We didn’t know, for example, that the shape ought to have had a condenser! It didn’t and we didn’t wonder or worry why that was so, we just celebrated the pipe and as it was part of the general Twain centenary celebration in the US, bought our copies of the Running Press’s Unabridged Mark Twain, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 and puffed contentedly.

The MT was marketed as having used the pipe in the Mark Twain Boyhood Museum in Hannibal, Missouri, but the longer I overthink it, the more I believe the stummel resembles not the original Patent 14 or the IFS/Eire Shape 14 day-old-donut, but the most recent version produced in the Éire and Early Republic era.

If you scroll up and compare the MT to the 1906, the other difference is the B stem with its much higher bend.

MT 2010

The MT Commemorative was reissued with the Large Tank (a shape I so wish I still had) in a two-pipe set in 2010, albeit with a unqiue matte stain and finish.

POY 2022 14B

Giacomo Penzo and his design team revived the Patent 14B in a very close reproduction to the original, so close in fact that it surprised many Pete Geeks (like me) who were expecting something more akin to the MT we’d grown up with and not a bowl that replicated the Golden Ratio proportions of Charles Peterson’s original creation! I say “bowl” because the B stem with its high bend is very like the MT’s B stem and not the low bend and longer stem of the Patent era.

308 CP Collection

The most recent chapter in the 14 / 308 saga is the Charles Peterson Collection 308 Premier System released through SPEu in a truly small batch of only 47 pipes. For old-timers this was a great catch, since the bowls—in my opinion as I have no official verification—were old stock from either the 1981-85 or the 2010 MTs, matching them precisely. The rusticated bowls were topped with sterling and a wonderful old stock P-Lip stem (the same used on 309s from c. 2000) which, a little surprisingly, did not have a condenser! Despite that, a worthy stopping place until the 308 / 14 comes back into the catalog, as surely it must.

Inconclusive Conclusions

What to make of all this?

Well, the shape has evolved. It is an example of the first of Glen Whelan’s three reasons for shape change, “organic evolution in shaping during production,” an outstanding one at that. It allows us to revel in the historical changes wrought on the shape as it was made from the 1890s until 2023—the entire span of K&P history. For those so inclined, it allows an amazing opportunity for collecting—and I haven’t even touched on some of the outlier shape 14s that have appeared.*

Depending on what kind of taxonomy you use, it looks like we have at least the following versions of the 14:

14(i): The Patent 1896
14(ii) The Patent 1906 and IFS
14(iii) The Éire and Early Republic
14(iv) The Mark Twain 1981, 2010 & CP 308
14(v) The 2022 POY 14B

As always, I’m interested in what other Pete Geeks think about all this, either from the trade side or the hobby side.

ADDENDA

Martin Kollmann CPG, No Name Tobaccos: “Six House Pipes waiting for Lucky No. 7.”

David Seulean CPG. “I just picked up one of my favorite Peterson System Pipe favorites … my 1990Sherlock Holmes System pipe…from a stem repair done at the Peterson Factory near Dublin, where I also went on a Fantastic tour of the factory….”

* Well okay, here’s three to whet your appetite–but I know there’s at least a dozen more if you ask around:

XL RUSTIC was released with a wonderfully sharp rusticstion and the wide-shoulder A stem at the same time as the MT.

Gaelach Dubh (“Black Irish”) was a beautiful sterling ebony line produced for Mario Lubinski in Italy. The acrylic F/T stem attempts to reproduce the 1896 stem bend.

Kapp-Royal was a super-high grade line produced for Mario Lubinski. Notice the inlaid aluminum P. I don’t think that’s genuine cumberland (it seems transparent), but it’s quite fetching.

** I wasn’t going to add this, but simply can’t resist. There is a Patent shape that wasn’t made past the Patent era that is the Golden Golden-Ratio pipe, shape 13:

Why it was discontinued is anybody’s guess. The number? The full-bent fun? But notice right next to it is the 14. The 13, incidentally, had a little cousin, the 17, seen in the 1906 catalog: