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  PSA THE PETE GEEK COFFEE MUG EVENT Orders will close this Tuesday. We met our minimum order requirements! ORDER FORM RIGHT HERE I have a good friend on the east coast and a few years ago he started the What Me Worry? Philosophy & Brown Water Society. We meet every week or so to discuss Peterson pipes and the meaning of life, and during a recent meeting he opened a drawer in his shop looking for something but discovered instead a box with several vintage Petes he’d forgotten about. He held them up one after another for us to analyze and then got to one that I’d seen in an early K&P brochure. I became so effusive about it that—this being his generous nature—he said we’d make a trade. I feebly tried to explain I have nothing that would be of interest--he being a genuine collector and me being a quotidian kind of smoker-collector. But it was too late and the pipe arrived three days later. This post is an interest payment on that future trade, not only because I was thrilled to get this System but because Shape 14 / 308 / 358 is one of the most instructive shapes we can look at to understand how shapes evolve in the Peterson catalog. At some point in the next month or two I want to share two new DIY tools I used to restore the gift pipe, but for this morning I’ve got enough to do to talk about (1) how and why shapes evolve at Peterson, (2) recount the importance of the Golden Ratio in Charles Peterson’s design language, and (3) demonstrate the organic evolution of the 14 / 308 / 358.   (1) HOW AND WHY SHAPES EVOLVE AT PETERSON If we count back to 1890, there’s been 136 years of shape changes. What does that mean, and how does that happen? For me, there’s a deep delight in exploring the catalog and discovering changes in a shape and often following out those changes—if I can find them—to add to my rotation. I asked Glen Whelan, Managing Director at Peterson, how and why a shape changes, and I encourage you to copy his answer down somewhere: “There are three reasons for shapes to change,” he writes. “[1] organic evolution in shaping during production; [2] changes driven by previous stummel suppliers (thankfully no longer an issue); and [3] changes we undertake in order to make a better pipe. This could be something along the lines of adding a steeper bend to better accommodate a System reservoir or refining a shape to just plain and simply make the pipe look nicer.” In earlier posts, we’ve looked out how the B42 / Darwin evolved, why the 05 System changed, and discovered there were no less than three different Gregson Adventures of Sherlock Holmes shape (2004 POY, 2008 POY, and 2011 Gregson). We’ve also looked at why the 120 Dublin changed. This morning we’re concerned only with Glen’s first rationale for…