Peterson De Luxe System

When Charles Peterson’s patent expired in 1916, K&P was faced with a marketing dilemma: what were they going to call the Patent System Pipes? As Stephanie Rains relates in her blog post  from Irish Media History, advertising as we know it today was just in its infancy. The success of Kapp & Peterson is in itself an example of how branded goods had become the norm for most Irish (and other) commodities—the thinking man smoking not just any pipe, but a Peterson pipe, of course. To transition the re-branding of the Patent System, K&P contracted McConnell’s, one of Ireland’s legendary advertising agencies, for some help. McConnell’s was just past its start-up, having been founded during Easter Week 1916, the week of the Uprising. The firm came up with a great slogan: "A Chip of the Old Block," as a banner for one of my favorite K&P posters, which I had seen many years ago but thought lost until just a few weeks before the Peterson book went to press. By 1917 the De Luxe designation was instated as the highest line in Peterson production for System and Classic Range pipes until the advent of the Supreme c. 1950 or so. Notice in the poster that the Classic Range De Luxe features not a P-Lip but a traditional-style mouthpiece—also signaling a sea change in the company’s production. I also love the “at least 150-year old briar” myth—one that was still circulating widely when I first took up the pipe, not dissimilar in its intent to Dunhill’s early claims for the Dead Root bruyere. As if. The first example of the De Luxe stamp I’ve been able to find in the Peterson catalogs is from 1937, stamped on only one bowl in the whole catalog, an 8B: The first mention of a sandblast De Luxe is in the c. 1945 catalog. I’ve seen only a handful of these early blasts and can only show you one, a 4s from the 1950s: As you can see, the blasting technique was far different then, the blast media creating a pointillistic effect reminiscent of Seurat and Signac. I especially like the pains the artisan took for blasting the rim, which you can see if you right-click to enlarge the image. There is no effort to follow the grain of the bowl (if it even had one) but it does possess a marvelous tactility. While the catalogs subsequent to 1945 refer to the availability of De Luxe System blast pipes, the next illustration I come across is in the 1978-79 Peterson-Glass catalog, which looks remarkably similar to the 1940s technique (Peterson's motto for so long being, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"): The photo from the 1979 catalog update is quite similar, as is the one in the 1983 catalog. But Peterson lost its bowl-turning and sandblasting capabilities and almost its existence with the downturn in pipe smoking in 1984. Sandblasting would not return to the De Luxe System until the Dublin era's first catalog…