Author: Mark Irwin

La le athair Shona! Happy Father's Day to you, whether you're a father, grandfather, father to your students or pater familias to those where you serve or work. Fathering is an enormous responsibility and one no one gets through unscathed. But the blessings are many, and so I lift my pipe to you wherever you are and in whatever capacity you serve. Stamps are important on a pipe, helping us date a year, a line and other specifics of its manufacture. Gary Malmberg, my co-author, has many times said that Kapp & Peterson is the second most datable factory pipe in the world, the first being Dunhill. But that’s only because Dunhill’s lower grades have always appeared under other names: first Hardcastle and Parker, then names like Start, Argyle, After Lunch, Crescent, Duke, Jockey Club and Scout, according to a note at Pipedia. Analogically, it’s like taking K&P’s Supreme and Deluxe lines and stamping them Petershill and then marketing and selling all their other pipes as Kappswamp. K&P has actually done an amazing job, considering how long it’s been in business, in helping Pete Geeks determine when they made a pipe. Bowl stamps and metal-mount markings are the two primary identifiers, but they can often be supplemented by bowl number and line. This year K&P has brought back the MADE IN IRELAND stamp, which you can see on a number of new pipes already on the market, like the new 160 Sterling Army here: “I’ve really missed the COM stamp,” Josh Burgess, Managing Director told me recently, “and we've discussed bringing it back for a bit now. We finally decided that the time was right. So we had a new one made up, which should start start appearing on basically everything.” Stamps are part of the story, but certainly not all of it, which is why for the world’s oldest continuously-producing briar pipe maker it’s helpful to have some backup reference material, like The Peterson Pipe Book and as many catalogs as you can lay your hands on. There are also some pitfalls to avoid. The most nefarious of all K&P stamps is this one: The MADE IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND stamp was introduced, unsurprisingly, right after the formation of the Republic of Ireland in 1949. It was stamped on almost but never all of K&P's pipes for over forty years, suffering a lingering death during the first decade of the Dublin era (1991-2018). There’s nothing wrong with the MITROI stamp, of course, except that many collectors still have the notion that a “pre-Republic” Pete—any without this stamp [and hence made before 1949]—is a pipe of better quality than one made afterwards. The truth is simply that it isn’t so. Factory standards didn’t suddenly slip from celestial to the substratum in 1949.  The fact is, K&P didn’t even put Country of Manufacture (COM) stamps on their pipes until the 1920s, the first being the IRISH FREE STATE. Just to be absolutely clear: there is no era or period in…