System Pipes

In 1979 actor Lee Van Cleef went to Dublin to make The Hard Way, an Irish hitman film, starring Patrick McGoohan of Danger Man and The Prisoner fame.  Van Cleef, celebrated by cineastes for his spaghetti westerns in the 1960s and 70s, is also held in special regard by pipemen for his roles in Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy. In two of those films, For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Van Cleef smokes a dutch billiard about which there has been conjecture over the years: was it a Peterson or some other brand? It’s a question that misses the mark, at least in the sense that while Kapp & Peterson wasn’t the only early marque to make the shape, only theirs would become truly iconic. If there is a single pipe that says “Peterson,” it’s the shape 4 (309) dutch billiard, made famous by not merely by K&P’s Thinking Man with a 4S hanging from his lips but also by Basil Rathbone’s 4AB as Sherlock Holmes. The pipe had a good run from 1891 through 2013 before it fell out of production due to low sales.  Just like pipe smokers asked the clerks in Peterson’s Grafton Street shop in the 1930s and 40s for the pipe that Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes smoked, so in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s they asked for the pipe that Van Cleef’s Angel Eyes smoked. In the course of various writing projects over the past several years I have been blessed to commission pipes from Silver Gray, Dirk Heinemann, Davide Iafisco and Claudio Cavicchi. I've also had other artisans say (very politely), “I’ll sell you a pipe, but I don’t do commissions,” which I understand. Asking an artist to collaborate with you can intrude on their creative territory, and some artisans just can’t work that way. But when I saw Giocomo’s ‘309’ Bent Billiard with Boxwood, I knew I was going to have to ask. Giocomo doing some finishing work on the new POY 2020 bowls You see, Penzo is the first artisan to craft completely hand-made pipes (i.e., the entire pipe made by a single person) since Paddy Larrigan retired in the early ’90s, and while the pipe would be branded G. Penzo and not Peterson, the facts that he’s Peterson’s pipe specialist and has made homages of what to me are K&P's two foundational shapes was quite enough. To my delight, he agreed. I began the discussion by suggesting we might use the color palette of the 1851 Navy Colt revolver and some of the other extraordinary weapons Angel Eyes (Van Cleef) used in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. On July 22nd he chose the briar, made a drawing of the pipe, transferred the pattern to briar and made the initial cuts: Four evenings later he returned to his little shop inside the Sallynoggin factory to shape the chamber and shank on the lathe. “I brought in the final part of…