William Bragge's Pipe Drawings: a Scattered Set of Records

William Bragge's pipe drawings are a hand-prepared visual archive documenting, piece by piece, what is considered the most extensive tobacco and pipe collection of the 19th century. Because the collection itself was sold off and dispersed during its owner's lifetime, these drawings have become nearly the only record combining each object's measurements and provenance in one place. Yet the set itself was later split apart as well; today not all twenty boxes are held in a single place.

The Catalogue's Testimony

The most reliable description of the drawings stands in Bragge's own catalogue. Entry no. 409 of Bibliotheca Nicotiana, printed in Birmingham in 1880 in a run of only two hundred copies, describes the collection's illustrated catalogue: the drawings are to scale, all the same size, made on specially prepared paper, and each carries the object's description and history in handwriting. The same entry gives the number of drawings as roughly 1,200 and states they were kept in twenty "book-like" boxes. The preceding entry, no. 408, introduces a separate set: 232 drawings of pipes from the British Museum, Christie's, the India Museum, and the Blackmore collections. Entry no. 407, meanwhile, records a notebook drawing in ink the marks of 260 English and 310 Dutch makers of clay pipes in the collection. Bragge thus recorded not only the objects but also his own method of documenting them.