History of Kapp & Peterson

  As the saying goes, sometimes you get the bear (pronounced “bar” in The Great Lebowski) and sometimes the bar gets you. Well, the bear got me a couple of week ago. I saw this 312 NOS with all the ephemera on eBay and thought I really, really need this. Not because of the pipe, as I have a beautiful 312 Premier from the Early Republic with a much lighter stain. No, because of that Chat Brochure. And that box. Everyone has their Pete passions. For some it’s eras. For some it’s COM stamps. For some it’s shapes. For some it’s lines. For some it’s ephemera as a whole.  And for me? Well, like so much in my life, it’s complicated.  I love ephemera, but I love primarily because it tells a story. If I see a box I don’t have—like this one, which is incidentally, the same wider shape employed on the 1975 Centenary boxes—that interests me. Or if it’s a special version of a shape—like the “Fat Boy” 302 Chris Lauer recently acquired (see “Collector’s Corner” below)—that interests me. Or may it’s the first SH Original, the F/T stem version, which Lance Dahl sold me at a price well below market value at the Chicago show.* But I digress. I gifted this set to someone once upon a time, the most astonishingly complete I'd ever seen. Please don’t ask if I sometimes wish I had it back. Boxes and pipe box brochures and pipe socks and Gratis Pipe Tools and even pipe box guarantees: these used to be routine for anyone making a Peterson pipe purchase. The Good Old Days. The first years of the blog I talked about all these time and again, hammering the point as often as possible that a great deal of what we know of Peterson pipes comes down to us through K&P’s disposable advertising ephemera.  Don’t take me wrong—every other pipe maker I know thinks the same.  I suppose it’s only hobbyists who can indulge in the pursuit of material culture, and that’s simply one of the great divides between us and them. The recent reproduction of the century-old Moth Demonstrator is of course a case in point. It might so easily have happened that none of the moths survived. So, “on with the show!” as Our Gang said. Notice the upper right hand corner of the box—this really excited my passion for Peterson history. A source in Australia? A clue to the Mystery of Peterson in Australia? “But wait, there’s more!” as they used to say in TV commercials. Lookit, gang! A "Chat" box brochure I have never seen. The “Chat” brochures always tell part of the Peterson story, and to let this one escape would be a crime against myself. So I set my sights and my bidding and ... lost. Judge, jury, and executioner. Something like this has actually happened to me before. I wrote the seller to see if he’d send me scans of an important catalog that…