Pipe Books and Publications

Pipe books and publications make up this pursuit's own written memory. The literature falls roughly into four clusters: monographs on the history of pipes and tobacco, studies documenting a single brand's past, collector-oriented reference and dating guides, and, finally, literary essays and anthologies. The overwhelming majority of these publications are in English; original Turkish-language sources are practically nonexistent, so a reader interested in the subject is usually forced to read in a foreign language.

Early Classics

The oldest examples of this literature came out of literature itself. Scottish writer J. M. Barrie's 1890 book My Lady Nicotine is a collection of short, humorous essays about the struggle to quit tobacco; the fictional "Arcadia" blend mentioned in the book went on to become a small legend of its own among later generations.

The book that first made the pipe's history a systematic subject of study is Alfred Dunhill's The Pipe Book, published in 1924. Bringing the pipe traditions of different cultures together in a single volume, the work has been reprinted many times since, and its author was elected to the Royal Society of Arts in 1925. Roughly thirty years later, in 1954, Dunhill also published The Gentle Art of Smoking. That same year saw the release of Georges Herment's The Pipe, translated from the French original — one of the early handbooks on choosing, smoking, and caring for a pipe.