71. Reading the Story of A Premier System
According to my co-author Gary Malmberg, Petersons are the second most-datable pipes with a long history, after Dunhills post-1920 (which as a rule all have a date code) and Ashton. Every pipe has a story, even if most of those stories are lost, but one of the things we hope the Peterson book and a few of the major catalog reprints will do is help collectors learn how to read the story of each Peterson they companion or are thinking of adding to their rotation. I thought I might use the pipe pictured above as an example, which arrived a few weeks ago. The pipe we’re looking at appears to be new, or at least “new / old stock,” but how old, exactly? The Bowl The first place to begin, of course, is with the bowl itself. When dealing with a Peterson pipe, this means knowing a little about the bowl’s line, shape number(s), shape changes, and chuck marks. Unlike many other pipe-makers who sand out the chuck marks from the lathe inside the chamber, Peterson has, since the beginning, simply left them. Usually these four bands of pin-points can be seen even when covered by the dark vegetable-base “paint” used in later years (which is not a pre-carb, by the way). The chuck marks are your guarantee that what you’re buying is really “new / old stock” and not a pipe that has been expertly reconditioned. A minor point, but fun to know, I think. The 300 shape series numbers were in place by the 1937 catalog, and the book details the evolution of how they came about, as well as providing a cross-reference table of System shapes with other series numbers. Originally this was a Patent shape 11, described in the ephemera as a “large billiard.” Today’s 11S is the shape as it is deployed in the De Luxe System line. The shape has had two other numbers: the X220, also in use today in the Classic (or non-System) Range, and the 72, its old Dunmore Premier System number. This only tells us what we will find out from other evidence: that the pipe was made after 1937 or so. But redundancy, as communication theorists know, is a welcome tool. While the vast majority of shapes in the Peterson catalog have exactly the same external dimensions they did when they were first introduced (barring slight differences caused by sanding and sandblasting), there are a few that have changed slightly over the years. The 999 springs to mind as the most obvious example, morphing as it did from a chubby author (“John Bull”) to a leaner rhodesian. But the 312 has also changed over the years, becoming slightly less curvy, a little thinner in the shank, and a bit shorter. You can see this in the two photos below. In the first, from left to right are height examples from the Eire era, the Early Republic era, the Late Republic era, and the Dublin (present) era. As you…