The 1976 Jumbo Dunhills: Shapes 612 and 622

The 1976 Jumbo Dunhills are unusually oversized bent pipes bearing shape numbers 612 and 622, produced by Dunhill within a single year. The brand had made far larger "magnum" pipes back in the 1920s and 1930s, but those giants fell outside the standard shape chart.

What sets the 1976 examples apart is that they reach what are believed to be the largest dimensions ever seen among pipes stamped with the catalogue's regular numbers. Their documentation in the collecting literature owes much to collector John C. Loring's survey, published in 2001.

Reading the Number

In 1975 Dunhill abandoned its old system of assigning a separate number to each shape and moved to a shape-numbering code in which the digits carried meaning. In this first three-digit version, the first digit indicated the body's group size (1 through 6), the second the mouthpiece style (0 and 1 for tapered, 2 for the stepped "saddle" style), and the last digit the shape itself; the code was expanded to four and then five digits in 1978. Under this scheme, 612 and 622 are two mouthpiece variants of the same bent body. One side effect of the system was that quite different bodies could be grouped under a single number. This is why the oversized 1976 examples can only be told apart from ordinary group-6 pipes bearing the same number by their dimensions.