System Pipes

Rev. 8/22/2022 with special thanks to Daniel Billings For this second “Famous Pete Smokers” post, I want to look at another controversial figure, Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain (1835-1910).  Kapp & Peterson first issued the Mark Twain, their most famous commemorative, in 1981.1  Much of the story of how it came about and most of the versions in which it has been issued is told and seen in The Peterson Pipe. The connection between Twain and K&P goes back to their very first catalog, which used a testimonial on pipe-smoking written by Twain. While he didn’t mention the Peterson Patent System, the testimonial seems to infer by its inclusion that Twain was smoking them as early as 1895. 2 The original Limited Edition of 400 from 1981 came in a fantastic rough-wood presentation box Many would name Twain America’s great humorist and first authentic literary voice, yet for the past several decades he has been increasingly recognized as one of America’s severest critics and darkest voices. Biographer Ron Powers argues throughout his book that the two are intertwined. Twain’s rough edges began upsetting people early on, beginning with his wife Livy’s family, Livy and their eldest daughter Clara, contemporaries President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and thence to a long list of right-wingers and fundamentalists that stretch to the present day. Twain’s books have been banned, his essays suppressed, his work bowdlerized, not only by enemies but by friends and family who felt his reputation needs sanitizing.  So who more likely to issue a commemorative pipe than Kapp & Peterson? 3 Twain and John T. Lewis, the original behind Jim's character in Huckleberry Finn in a photograph by Thomas E. Marr.  Note the Peterson Patent on the step. Twain’s life and work remain sharply, searingly contemporary over one hundred years after his death because the faults and foibles he satirizes in American culture haven’t changed. An adamant abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, he observed first-hand British white privilege in South Africa, India and the Malay Peninsula and was outraged at the racist imperialism the US displayed in the Philippines and Hawaii. A longtime friend of Helen Keller, he not only supported women’s rights but actively campaigned for women’s suffrage. 4  Certainly Twain lived his life, as Powers notes in his biography, more like a rock star than a writer: his very quirkiness, his game-changing greatest hits from “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to A Tramp Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, The Mysterious Stranger, “1601” and “A War Prayer” all establish his unassailable street creds. The XL Rustic was the only domed-mount version of the MT System released. It uses the broad Comfort Lip button seen from 1981-84 on the big System pipes, a nickel mount and a tiny crystalline rustication process. The leather pipe stand found in the box was a give-away in many pipe boxes at the time. For us as Pete Geeks, Twain must always be seen as an expression of the “Thinking Man,”…