Pipe of the Year

  THE VERSIONS Heritage Terracotta     Sandblast Natural   PSB RUSTIC     Ebony   THE LAUNCH The POY 2021 / 4AB homage will be released Friday morning, December 3rd, 2021, at Smokingpipes.eu and Smokingpipes.com in a limited, numbered edition of 500 pipes total. It will be available this year in seven finishes: rustic, sandblast, ebony, Terracotta, Heritage, PSB and Natural. I haven’t heard whether there is a Supreme or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised. This is the first System in the POY’s twenty-four year history and K&P  has outdone themselves with a painstakingly retro-engineered bowl, ferrule, AB vulcanite mouthpiece and screw-in “chimney” or tenon extension, all taken from the 1937 catalog. It is, in fact, the shape Basil Rathbone smoked opposite Nigel Bruce in many of the Sherlock Holmes films for Twentieth-Century Fox back in the 1930s and ’40s. “Watson, is there a different time zone in Dublin?” --the first sighting of Basil Rathbone's 4AB in the franchise   Continuing their practice from previous years, K&P has issued a special "Chat with the Smoker" brochure in each POY pipe box as well as a green suede leather pipe bag The drop for Europe will be 10am GMT, which gives friends across the pond and Very Early Risers here in the US an opportunity to see what’s on offer on the Smokingpipes.eu site before the POY goes on sale later in the morning here in the US.   In conjunction with the POY2021, Smokingpipes.com is debuting an exclusive limited edition of The Pipes of Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, which I believe will be out on Thursday, December 2nd. It features an interview with K&P’s pipe specialist Giacomo Penzo on the creation of the POY 2021 and some of the challenges he and the creative team faced. It also gives the fan a complete survey of the pipes in the Sherlock Holmes 14-film franchise that ran from 1939 to 1946. Kapp & Peterson’s Federica Bruno translated Giaco’s interview and Adam O’Neill, Marketing Manager for SPEu, provided some great photos. If you want the complete story of Rathbone and Peterson pipes, this is it. Help support my PAD and buy a copy to go with your POY!   THE ENGINEERING Take the Reverse-Engineering Challenge: Here’s two 4AB bowls, one from the period of the Rathbone films (c. 1940) and one from the 2021 edition. Which is which? For the answer, scroll to the bottom of this post. I think all the Pete Geeks have been blown away by the Laudisi Era’s commitment to the heritage of K&P, on display nowhere more clearly than in the three POYs they’ve released. The 2019 John Bull (999) was a first—a P-Lip and a vulcanite stem. It disappointed some because it wasn’t a more exact recreation of the original. The 2020 9BC took things up a level, with K&P’s pipe specialist Giacomo Penzo creating three prototypes and the crew selecting the finest. While it actually turned out to be more like the original Patent…