System Pipes

PSA Wish you'd gotten a 160th SPC Set? Our web geek CPG Matthew Ramsey has provided URLs for pipes still available at SPC! See the end of the blog.   This morning we can at last circle back to the amazing Pete Geek Meet at the 2025 Las Vegas Pipe Show. This morning there are some truly incredible Petes to see from the collection of James Walsh CPG.  While James has a special fondness for the Republic Era, he is also interested in every other era.  There's enough here to occupy you through two pipes and three cups of coffee, so I'd best be letting you get on with it. A HAND MADE TWIN-BORE This one off, from the early to mid-1970s, features a hand cut stem, a horn shank end and the rare twin bore airway that was being experimented with in the 1970s by K&P and some Italian pipe makers.   SELECTIONS FROM THE WALSH 700 SHAPES COLLECTION It's difficult to know how many decades the original 700 shape group spans. James has more than I've seen from any other collector. Almost all I've seen have been stamped "DeLuxe Special."   You can probably guess which shape from the Dublin era this beefy 722 reminds me of.   XL723 DeLuxe Special   I have a special fondness for the dublin shape, and once let several go which I've lived to regret.  This 724 is an XL shape and one of the finest examples I've ever seen from K&P in its shaping aesthetic: notice the perfect forward cant and wonderful flare of the bowl and the extra-long shank. I can easily imagine this with a sterling band and P-Lip. It far surpasses what is currently being made. 724 DeLuxe Special.   We sometimes think K&P has been "catalog-bound" to particular shapes. The reality is far more nuanced, as the 700 group shows. This 742, in particular, is a beautiful hybrid owing its inspiration to a number of standard shapes, all wrapped up in the distinctively Irish aesthetic of Peterson design language. 742 DeLuxe Special   744 DeLuxe Special This 744 DeLuxe Special was an "IRC Exclusive" in the Iwan Reis 1975 catalog, one of a number of collaborative designs from the 1970s between Iwan Reis and Peterson. Like the Dublin Era's B Shape group, the IRC Exclusives exhibited Peterson willing to step outside the box and look at contemporary styles.   745 DeLuxe Special, an "IRC Exclusive"     772 DeLuxe Special   765 Dublin and London Special   779 DeLuxe Special I rarely give a second glance at a straight billiard, but this one is one I have. There's something amazing about its lines, especially the front of the bowl in proportion to the stem length and proportioning of the stem.   SELECTIONS FROM THE WASLH CUMBERLAND SPIGOTS For whatever reasons lost to history, during the 1990s K&P routinely employed cumberland ebonite for many of their super-high grades. The stock persisted until the early 2000s, I can document,…