James Walsh

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.

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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 right from Ken Sigel’s collection. Mason did the pipe photographs as well as the history photos at the beginning of the catalog. His family business, which encompassed commercial photography as well as postcard printing, did the letterpress halftones.

For the presentation, therefore, I wanted to look at how this legacy came down to us through five tropes: evolution, apostolic succession, the collective unconscious, anamnesis, and mission. Some of them I use whimsically, some more seriously. Each is designed to illuminate the DNA of our favorite company and the pipes they’ve made for 160 years now.  I hope you’ll think about owning your own copy.

Peterson’s Patent Pipes: The Historic 1906 Catalog, 192pp., 9 x 12 inches, available only at Smokingpipes.com beginning Thursday, May 29th, at approximately 3:30pm EDT. I can’t remember the price; I think it’s about $65 before the discount.

 

The 1906 Catalog Celebration Tobacco Mat

I continue to enjoy creating paper tobacco mats for special PPN occasions, and for the Chicago show’s launch of the 1906 catalog reprint, I used a Patent era shipping carton with elements from the Patent era Gold Box tin’s address and telephone (the Gold Box tin history and a tobacco mat from it are here).  P. J. O’Reilly, the printer down the street from K&P and its head a fellow Rotarian with Alfred Kapp, made the shipping carton box as well as many of K&P’s pipe boxes in the first several decades.  The element at the lower right hand corner of the mat, the Irish Illuminati, is the fictional or perhaps not-so-fictional organization which has a committee devoted “to the preservation and promotion of the culture, heritage, and artifacts of Kapp & Peterson of Dublin.”

If you have an inkjet printer at home or access to a printer in the office, this one prints up really well on 130gsm kraft paper, although a 20 lb or 24 lb cream is also quite nice. I tried to tuck a few into each book we sold at the show. You can download it with the PDF link below:

Patent Pipe Box Tobacco Mat for 1906 catalog

 

Pete Geek Event
“A Chip of the Old Block” Patent-era Reproduction Poster

The 4″ x 6 Card

A few years ago, a 4″ x 6″ advertising card appeared with the “Chip of the Old Block” ad that McConnell’s Advertising Service did for Kapp & Peterson. It was quite pricey–$595 if I remember.  I did the usual “best offer” thing for considerably less, then watched the little ad for months and months. It eventually disappeared from eBay’s listings, although I don’t remember ever seeing someone buy it. It gave me the color cues I needed to do a large, full-scale reproduction.

The point-of-sale version from the 1980s.

If you have the big Peterson book, you’ve seen it and read how a 16″ x 20″ sepia version came to me, quite by chance, from an extremely generous Canadian woman. It arrived barely in time for the the book and was very exciting to me because I’d seen this reproduction on our first visit to the old Peterson shop on Grafton Street in 2009.

The poster was one of four or five reproductions K&P released at some point in the 1970s and ’80s, as far as I can determine.  A close friend of ours brought me the Thinking Man home from Ireland around 1982 or 1983.  Then there were two taken from pages in the 1896 catalog “The Strong Man” and “Pipe of the Century”—proof that Peterson still had this catalog in the 1980s. Then there was what may have been K&P’s first-ever advertisement, “The Arbitrator,” which I saw on my first visit to the Grafton Street shop in 2009 and which Adam O’Neill scanned for the 1896 reproduction catalog. I used for the cover of the 1896 catalog reproduction. Some or all of these posters were available as point-of-sale materials for tobacconists, which would be hung up in their shops, just as Peterson’s shops on Grafton Street and London’s Burlington Gardens used them.

“A Chip of the Old Block” poster dates from shortly after the Easter Rising in May 1916. We know this for two reasons: first, the McConnell’s agency always prided itself on opening for business during the very week of the Rising.* Second, the poster is advertising the advent of the DeLuxe line, which didn’t appear until the demise of the first patent in 1910.

I wanted this poster for myself, framed and matted on my wall.  So I wrote Chas. Mundungus, who does all this kind of work for me from his studio on Lake Geneva, and a few weeks later the files arrived.

We had 15 printed on high-quality art paper. Each poster will come rolled and mailed in a cardboard tube. They are printed with a framing border to provide space for mounting (see “Swag” picture below). Price including shipping in the US is $27.00; International, please send me an email @ petegeek1896@gmail.com  & Gigi will let you know.

US: $27 including shipping; fill out the Google Form and Gigi will bill you via PayPal.
International: email me at petegeek1896@gmail.com, and I’ll have Gigi send you the price ($20+shipping).

Google Form: CHIP POSTER

 

…and more from the show, courtesy of Lance Dahl’s exhibit at the PG Meet:

From Lance’s table at the Meet: notice the LIMITED in the K&P sticker in the briar amber bulldog. In a world of rarities, this is even rarer.

 

Dan, Lance, & James added amazingly to the joy of the show for me and everyone they met, as you can see.

 

Ken and Gary show us what pipe shows are all about: the fellowship of the briar.

The show is also about the Swag–as Dan said above.  I brought home a 125th Anniversary unsmoked 307 from Ken Sigel  and an exquisite new leather rest & tampers handcrafted by Gary Hamilton. Friend Matt Guss of Seattle Pipe Club fame also sold me one of the last 8 oz tins of Plum Pudding (something about the whole show restored my long absent enjoyment of great English/Balkan tobaccos–golly, why did I sell all that Penzance?!). And from Mark Berman CPG, a delightful set of “Pipe Smoking Decision Dice”–something every serious pipeman should have in his pipe bag for those days of uncertainty.

 

Dan Chasin
Location: Pheonix, Arizona
Interest/Collecting Peterson Since: 2014
Occupation: Operations Manager

Dan Chasin, co-administrator of Facebook group Pipe Smokers of Ireland (PSOI), has a knack for finding gems among gems. At this year’s Chicago show, Dan found an abounding number of special Peterson finds. Below are some of the beautiful pieces he added to his collection.

This XL15 Supreme is a true gem and very rare as finding a block of this size with such exceptional grain to attain the supreme designation is borderline impossible. To christen this find, Dan loaded a bowl of original release Kingfisher (30+ years old) that he brought to the show to share. I was lucky enough to fire up a bowl of this with Dan and I don’t know if there is a better choice for a first smoke. This Supreme comes adorned with the new 2025 stamp seen above.

 

Two more exquisite high grades found at the Peterson table are a System Deluxe 2s with silver cap and a Deluxe Classic 65. Notice how chubby the 2s is! I’m not sure how the 65 didn’t make the cut for a supreme grade, but what a little stunner.

 

2015 Founders Edition (unsmoked) from the Danish Pipe Shop on top of a Nappa leather, 7-piece, Peterson pipe bag acquired from “THE GREAT Ken Siegel” as Dan calls him. The bag was a protype sent to Peterson, as a sample, that never went into production circa 2002.

 

Acquired form an estate seller, a 314 African block meerschaum, a stunning shape 25 natural finish with a cumebrland spigot (unsmoked), and a rusticated Sherlock Holmes Professor Junior. In speaking with Dan, the rustication on the Professor Junior is his favorite version produced by Peterson. The little shape 25 is seldom seen these days and is absolutely beautiful.

 

Found on the Iwan Ries table, an Old English Collection shape 55 liverpool. In my opinion, the star of the OE collection.

 

Acquired from fellow CPG Lance Dahl, in an undisclosed trade, one of Dan’s favorite shapes, a rusticated Turkish meerschaum Sherlock Holmes Squire. This was unsmoked when it passed from Lance’s hand to Dan’s. Shortly thereafter, Dan took this for its maiden voyage in the smoking tent surrounded by awestruck CPGs.

 

Finally, PPN swag! I have an idea of where Dan found this great stuff! Some might recognize the Gary Hamilton Dracula tamper.

Many thanks to Dan for sharing his show finds here and more importantly, sharing his time at the show with the CPGs and PSOI members in attendance! More from Dan in the future…

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*See Stephanie Rains’s splendid article, “Paying the Bills: Irish Mass Media and the Advertising Industry, at Irish Media History.