Commemoratives

I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. —“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Kapp & Peterson’s long association with the Great Detective continued yesterday with the release of the 2021 Christmas pipe. This year’s edition features all fourteen current-production Sherlock Holmes shapes.  Each is being released in three finishes: Heritage, Sandblast and Rusticated, for a total of 42 Christmas possibilities. The 2021 pipes feature a copper band with the Sherlock Holmes stamp and and the recently-redesigned acrylic fishtail stem in black, which makes for some amazing variations.Each pipe comes with a Peterson leather pipe holder with the Sherlock Holmes icon, making the series more-or-less a must-have for ephemera hounds. This heavy duty stand was first issued in with the 2021 St. Patrick’s Day pipe in light green with a shamrock icon and subsequently in the general-release Avoca (dark green) and Grafton (tan). Left to right: 2018, 2019 and 2020 Christmas "Coppers" The first Christmas “copper” was released as an army mount 2018 and used subsequently in the Christmas pipes for 2019 and 2020. I remain extremely vain about these issues because I harbor a belief that it was my whining and moaning to Conor Palmer about the old nickel-mount marks that gave him the idea to include them on the copper ferrules for those years. I’m sure you’ve read Chuck Stanion’s recent post on the 2021 Peterson Christmas pipe but in case you haven’t, here’s the backstory: “'It was Ted Swearingen's idea,' says Josh Burgess, managing director of Peterson. Ted is our Chief Operating Officer here at Laudisi Enterprises, which currently stewards Peterson. 'Ted’s idea was to do a Sherlock Holmes Christmas pipe. He proposed it in 2019 at the Dortmund show. We had finished our setup for the show but it wasn’t open yet, so we were getting ready, and the subject of Christmas pipes came up. Ted pitched this idea for doing copper-mounted Sherlock shapes. We all immediately conjured mental images of Victorian Christmases and Sherlock and Watson smoking pipes. We really liked the marriage of those themes, with the Christmas aesthetic we had established in 2018 of the copper mount. It’s festive in a really Peterson kind of way. It features the sort of metalwork that we're known for, but with copper for Christmas.' This is the first year that Peterson Christmas pipes have been released with more than one finish. 'We'll have black sandblasts,' says Josh, 'and the Heritage finish, which is a smooth, dark burgundy finish. And we'll also have a rustic offering, which is the red-and-black, rusticated finish that is found on the Sherlock series and lines like the Donegal Rocky.'" What Chuck didn't mention but I'm sure he knew was…