Impact of the 1906 Catalog

PSA Pete Geek Event "Chip of the Old Block" Late Patent-era Poster see end of post   THE IMPACT OF THE 1906 CATALOG For the presentation at the Chicago show, I wanted not to simply do a recap of the new reproduction of the historic 1906 catalog and what readers will find in it--they could read that book themselves, after all--but to talk about the fundamental impact that crucial document has had on the history of Kapp & Peterson. https://youtu.be/cYw1WaIlfao Runtime 52:42 If you've been in the hobby for a few decades, you've probably got at least one or two factory pipe catalogs on your shelf or PDFs on your computer. But the 1906 Peterson is a different thing almost entirely.  It was the outgrowth of a very long collaboration between the Kapp family, going back to 1865, and Charles Peterson. First, of course, his tutelage under Frederick Kapp in Dublin. Kapp took the 22 year old, fresh from his journeyman wood turning year in Hamburg, and taught him how to carve. To carve meerschaums and briars and how to turn, mold and fashion vulcanite and amber stems. Even--inevitably if one thinks about it--how to turn silver, because in Kapp's little tobacco shop there weren't any other workmen. Just Kapp.  And now Peterson. After Frederick died, Charles began another Kapp relationship--or two, actually. First, he stood more or less in loco parentis over Frederick's boys Christian and Alfred. Then, he married Frederick's brother George's widow, as George, too, had died.  Sarah and Charles obviously knew one another quite well beforehand, and after a honeymoon they led a comfortable, happy married life for a decade, until she took ill and died.  But long before that, Sarah had invested her inheritance from George in Charles's patent work, eventuating in the 1890 patent.  This was a patent held solely by Charles for a number of years after her death, until, remarried to Annie O'Regan, he sold the patent to the company now called "Kapp & Peterson." That company marked his next Kapp relationship, with Frederick's son Alfred, who was through Sarah Charles's nephew in law. They, too, enjoyed a close relationship, often traveling together for the company. K&P was never a one-man show, and yet . . . (Above, one of my favorite side bar pages from the book, made possible thanks to K&P's business meeting notes for 1904-1906, provided by Glen Whelan at Peterson. While K&P was by no means a one man show--how could it be?--it did rest on the engineering and design achievements of one man, Charles Peterson.  So when we open the 1906 catalog, we're getting as close as we can now get to the man himself.  Apart from the pipes themselves, it's his legacy to his company and to the pipe smoking world. Above: one of the crucial clues to the making of the catalog came in a discovery of Thomas H. Mason's photo of an extraordinary Patent House Pipe demonstrator. The same pipe, albeit capable of being smoked, is seen at the…