132. A Short History of the Making of the Peterson Pipe Book
This week marks the 5th anniversary of Peterson Pipe Notes, and while there’s still a wealth of lore to share here on the blog and lots of promising research to be done, it seems like an opportune moment to stop and say thank you to everyone who has been on the journey which led to The Peterson Pipe’s launch at the Chicagoland show a few weeks ago. At the show I had the privilege not only of meeting a number of long-time Pete fans, but of talking at length about the making of the book as well as how it's put together. You probably don’t want to read all that, but you might be interested in some of the highlights. C. S. Lewis once said that we write the books we want to read, and I’ve wanted to read a book about Peterson for almost as long as I’ve been smoking their pipes—not long after I first discovered Carl Ehwa’s enchanted Books of Pipes and Tobacco, in fact. Jim Lilley After writing about a pilgrimage to the Peterson factory for the NASPC’s The Pipe Collector in 2009, I began to think more seriously about the possibility of a book. In 2011 I contacted the late Jim Lilley, who had been blogging about Peterson for about a year. I convinced him that’d I “gopher” (liaise) the book if he and a few others would do the heavy lifting and thus began a year’s discussion, planning and outlining of what we’d like to see in the book. "Trucker" Chuck Wright Jim’s declining health forced him to withdraw from the project not long after our initial planning sessions, but not before he put me in touch with the late Chuck Wright, who was very active on the Peterson boards, and with then-Sacramento Pipe Club president (and estate pipe dealer) Gary Malmberg. Several months later, in May 2012, with an outline, reams of research and a dash of courage, Gary and I met with Gary B. Schrier of Briar Books Press at the Chicagoland Pipe and came away not long after with a contract. To my amazement. To rightly understand the project, you need to know that I had never been to a pipe show. Although I’d been a pipeman since 1975, published a little pipe zine back in the 80s and occasionally wrote to Tom Dunn or Gene Umberger, my puffing was for the most part a solitary affair. This meant that I wanted all the help I could get on the book. While there were a few who thumbed their noses at us (figuratively speaking), we eventually coerced some of the hobby’s brightest talents into participating in various ways. First was the real hospitality and sustained help of Tom Palmer, Peterson’s CEO and owner until 2018. Then came help from Sykes Wilford at Laudisi, who created a secret back door into the Smokingpipes digital archive for me to study every Peterson pipe they’d sold. Then came the enthusiasm and writing of Rick…