Tom Dunn

Tom Dunn was the publisher who let the pipe community find itself in the pre-internet era. In 1964 he founded both the loosely organized The Universal Coterie of Pipe Smokers and The Pipe Smoker's Ephemeris, the magazine that became the group's voice; he edited and distributed it single-handedly until his death in 2005. Records give Dunn a birth year of 1938, and he ran the publication out of his home in Queens, New York.

How the Magazine Was Made

For forty years, the Ephemeris stayed a one-man operation. Text was typed on a mechanical typewriter, pages were run off on a mimeograph machine in the early decades, and envelopes were stuffed at the house in Queens. Dunn himself described the publication as an "irregular quarterly," and indeed the interval between issues was never fixed — some years passed with only a single number. There was never a subscription fee; getting on the mailing list simply required writing in.

Most of the pages were filled with readers' letters. A correction to a brand's history, notes from a visit to a tobacconist in some faraway city, an announcement of a newly printed book, personal impressions of tobacco, and information supplied by makers and firms could all sit side by side in the same issue. The broader landscape of this kind of publication is covered in the entry on pipe books and periodicals.