449. Scott Forrest Discovers the Historical “Thinking Man” (+SPD Tampers)
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
The Green Harp Flag
PSA:
2025 Pete Geek Tampers from Gary Hamilton!
They’re here!—the 2025 Pete Geek Tampers from Gary Hamilton. This year he’s offering 24 tampers ahead of the Chicago show, six each in each of the four variations shown here. Pricing for the US is the same as last year, $50 each, which includes shipping.
Gary will be taking more SPD tampers to the Chicago show for interested Pete Geeks, then following the show he’ll be selling them to all our brethren overseas.
- There are 24 tampers available–6 of each variation.
- If you would like more than one tamper, please submit a second form.
- Price is $50 each, including shipping in the US (Sorry, no international shipping for this event.)
- Payment will be made through PayPal. Please watch for a PayPal request from Gary Hamilton.
- Questions? Send email to petegeek1896@gmail.com
SOLD OUT! 1:14 pm CDT
But here’s a link for the waiting list,
as we’re hoping Gary may have time to make a few more:
You MUST fill out the Google Form to place an order:
Here is the waitlist link: https://forms.gle/FEgwth2oE2PgcSJ16
Who Was the Real “Thinking Man?”
Frontispiece to the 1906 catalog
In the commentary to the upcoming release of the Peterson Patent Pipes 1906 Catalog, there is an exploration of K&P’s mission. There I make the case that the famous paragraphs at the beginning of the 1896 and 1906 catalogs about “the importance of supplying as perfect a Pipe as possible” as a real human good weren’t mere puffery (that’s a legit legal term, BTW) nor the result of business data analytics, but the product of true pride* and genuine belief. I can imagine those whose work is in advertising and data analysis may roll their eyes at that. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe, however, there is a solid rock on which human dignity depends and that the success of Kapp & Peterson as well as its counter-cultural appeal may very well lie in something Socrates once said: ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ —“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
And that brings me to Scott Forrest CPG and his detective work. Scott’s business is in antique collectibles and it’s no surprise therefore that he’s one of the foremost collectors of vintage Petes in the world. If you’ve read the blog for long or haunt eBay for Petes, you’ve seen his crisp, clear and distinctive Pete photos at Belltown Vintage. Recently Scott’s been helping me understand printing process used for K&P’s 1906 catalog, and as serendipity (or grace) would have it, about the time he was helping me understand the difference between photogravure, rotogravure, and letterpress halftone, he ran across a photograph of the real-life historical man behind the Thinking Man icon.
Scott channeling the Thinking Man
As I understand it–and I may not be remembering this exactly right–the first thing Scott had to do was channel the Thinking Man. This wasn’t an easy task, and involved several intricate philosophical procedures and well over a pound of a secret vintage Irish tobacco, all of which he said were well above my pay grade. However, you can get the gist by referring to the photo he sent.
Just to refresh your memory, recall that in The Peterson Pipe: the Story of Kapp & Peterson, I wrote that the original engraving for the Thinking Man features an older man with wire-frame glasses slightly akimbo and smoking a Patent 4S Dutch Billiard.
The story, handed down at the factory and told to me when I interviewed veterans Dermot Ward and Harry Whelan, was that this engraving was of a famous professor at Trinity College, but who they couldn’t say (p. 66).
This got Scott Forrest thinking about Trinity College professors and alumni, and one thing led to another in his sleuthing until he ran across a photo (technically, he says, a photogravure) that is so amazingly like the engraving that there’s no doubt whatsoever in either of our minds that it served for the engraving itself.
So who was this historical figure, the man who became K&P’s Thinking Man, you ask? Good question, and we can answer it for you: Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86). Born in Belfast, he studied law at Trinity College in Dublin from 1826 to 1832, then set up his practice as a barrister there. He married a great-great-niece of Arthur Guinness, Mary Guinness (1823-1905). Guinness—where have I heard that name before?
The Dunloe Ogham Stones near Killarny
Ferguson was the epitome of a thinking man, a polymath, in fact. His interest of nature and antiquities led to a number of important antiquarian articles, eventually published as Ogham Inscriptions in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland (1887). The Ogham stones, sometimes called “Celtic Tree Alphabets,” are something Tolkien doubtless absorbed in creating his own mythology.
The back of Gigi’s Ogham Pendant with her name in the Ogham alphabet
On your next visit to Ireland, if you go near Killarney you can stop not far outside town and see the Dunloe Ogham Stones, although such stones are found all over the Emerald Isle. Journeying on into Killarney, if you stop in at Brian de Staic’s jewelry shop, you can have a pendant made up for your lady love and have her name inscribed in the Ogham alphabet on the back.
Preface from Congal (1872)
Ferguson was also well known as one of Ireland’s foremost poets. His poetry–Lays of the Western Gael (1865), Congal (1872), and Poems (1890)—combines a love of Irish mythology, antiquities, and nature that is anachronistically reminiscent of Tolkien’s legendarium.
As an Irish poet, Ferguson is acclaimed as the direct forebear of W. B. Yeats. His love poem, “Cean Dubh Deelish” (girl with beautiful black hair) could be something out of George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858):
PUT your head, darling, darling, darling,
Your darling black head my heart above;
O mouth of honey, with thyme for fragrance,
Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?
O many and many a young girl for me is pining,
Letting her locks of gold to the cold wind free,
For me, the foremost of our gay young fellows;
But I’d leave a hundred, pure love, for thee!
Then put your head, darling, darling, darling,
Your darling black head my heart above;
O mouth of honey, with thyme for fragrance,
Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?
Much more can be said of Ferguson, including mentions of a knighthood in 1878, a book of translations of early documents as well as his own blank verse translation of the life of St. Patrick in The Remains of St. Patrick (1888)–a fascinating and highly readable narrative poem which you can read for yourself in the PDF below– and his activities in the Royal Irish Academy as well as being its president in 1881.
For us, however, the question is, “did he smoke a Peterson Patent pipe?” To the best of our knowledge, no. A word search of Lady’s Ferguson’s two volume biography of her husband finds only one mention of a pipe, and that of a man in a little fishing boat off the coast of Inisman (one of the Aran islands) who was supposed to pick up Ferguson and his friends from an expedition. It was quite late and the fisherman fell fell asleep smoking his pipe well off the coast, nearly leaving them to a very unpleasant and solitary night on the island (I:338-39).
The K&P icon was first published in the 1906 catalog—about which more in that book’s reproduction coming in May. Lady Mary Ferguson died in 1905. They had no children. For much of their married life, they opened their home to Dublin’s various artists, scientists and literati on weekly basis. Lady Mary was an author of some renown in her own right. All this being the case, it’s doubtless the case that Charles Peterson and Alfred Kapp knew of them and had seen their books in the book stalls, even attended Sir Ferguson’s lectures. They may even have known him personally, although he was quite a bit older.
What’s certain is that someone at K&P saw the photogravure in the front of Lady Mary’s 1886 biography of her husband and said, “There: that’s the Thinking Man!”
And so he was.
Many, many thanks to Scott Forrest CPG
for not only sharing his discovery, but sourcing Lady Mary’s biography of
Sir Ferguson and providing a digital reproduction of the photogravure portrait
for this post and for the upcoming 1906 catalog reproduction.
Celtic Shamrock device and Thinking Man icon courtesy
Kapp & Peterson
John Miller CPG sent this along:
“Natural Petes, carnauba wax finished and buffed with white crew sock. Resting on my handmade leather, tobacco drying tray.”
*In Dickens’s last completed novel Our Mutual Friend, character Eugene Rayburn makes the useful distinction between true and false pride. True pride is what we feel in the delight of a genuine accomplishment, either our own or that of someone we love. False pride is based on ego, what the OT writer meant when Solomon wrote “pride goeth before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).
Trent Clifton CPG sent the following from Facebook:
PPN will return
Sunday, March 30th.
SLAVA UKRAINI
Молись за Україну
Pray for Ukraine