Alfred Dunhill's the Pipe Book (1924)

Alfred Dunhill's The Pipe Book is, among works that treat the pipe's history on a world scale, both the most frequently reprinted and the most debated. The book was published in 1924, in London by A. & C. Black and in New York by Macmillan.

Its author, Alfred Dunhill (1872-1959), founder of the Dunhill firm that bears his name, was in the years he wrote it both a well-known manufacturer and the owner of a notable pipe collection. As the lengthy subtitle announces, the volume contains 28 full-page plates (four in color) and 230 drawings scattered through the text.

The Book's Scope

It was not the first attempt of its kind. English painter and gunsmith Robert Taylor Pritchett's Ye Smokiana, published by Bernard Quaritch in 1890, had already brought together an illustrated survey of world pipes in a single volume thirty years earlier; there, the drawings were the primary element and the accompanying text secondary. In Dunhill's volume, that balance is reversed.

The chapter titles give away the book's intent: why people smoke, crude early pipes, straight and tube-shaped examples, pipes recovered from burial mounds, the pipes of North American Native peoples and the ceremonies that accompanied them, the peoples of South America, the polar regions, the Far East, water pipes, Africa's countless forms, clay pipes, selected European examples, and finally modern briar. The emphasis is markedly ethnographic; the space given to ceremonial pipes akin to the calumet far exceeds that given to the briar pipes that dominated the market in the years the book was written. Records note that the final chapter, on modern briar, runs to a mere eight pages. Dunhill was well aware of what he was doing: in his preface he asks specialists' indulgence in advance, describing the work not as a scholarly study but as a simple book. The volume has no bibliography and no footnotes.