B Shapes

IPSD—“International PETERSON Smoking Day” (or is that “pipe”?) is Thursday, February 20th. If you haven’t done so, please send a photo of your favorite Pete (or yourself and your favorite Pete), where you’re from and your vocation or interests to ipsd@petersonpipenotes.org before Thursday evening the 19th, 6pm CST. Over the past several years I have been in love with what amounts to the Irish equivalent of the English billiard—the straight dublin. It began innocently enough with a "meat and potatoes" Aran that I could use traveling and not worry about. But that pipe quickly revealed itself to be what Fred Hanna calls "a magic briar" and I soon looked for other Peterson dublins, only to be surprised at how good they smoked. I blush to confess I even left the Peterson fold and sought out dublins by Luciano, Becker, J. T. Cooke and Dirk Heinemann, and while not Petersons, they, too are pretty awesome pipes. When I posted my first attempt at a visual history of Peterson's Dublin shapes in 2018, I was dissatisfied not only with the illustrations but because I didn't have the patience to go on to Peterson's early heeled dublins and more recent bent dublins to complete the survey. Adding insult to injury, two dublin shapes since the original post appeared have altered my understanding of the shape's history in an important way, and as these impacted my understanding not only of Peterson’s past but also recent production, I thought it time to revise the whole thing.* I have heard some folk, including a favorite American artisan and my go-to pipes podcaster, cavil against the dublin shape for one of the very reasons I love it: its v-shaped chamber, which creates a more concentrated flavor as the bowl is smoked to the bottom. In my experience, this type of chamber requires the least number of relights of any bowl geometry and for that reason also trumps the billiard. That it is linked by name with Dublin (and so with Irish smoke) is yet a third reason for my affection. Seriously, can you think of any other pipe shapes named for a city? (No, Bull Moose, Minnesota doesn’t count.) The dublin shape name seems to appear with every other straight shape at the dawn of briar history in the last decades of the 19th century. The name suggests its origins and you might be pardoned for thinking it has something to do with the dudeen or clay pipe of Dublin. Well, no. And yes. No: dudeen, also spelled dudheen, doodeen, and doodheen, is from the Irish Gaelic dūidīn, and is the diminutive of dūd, “pipe,” so that a dudeen is “a short tobacco pipe made of clay,” according to the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. And “Dublin,” of course, is from the Irish dubhlinn (dubh = black and linn = pool). The dublin shape is common among clays, but not specific to the town of Dublin. Yes: Somehow, quite early in the history of briar pipes,…