Anne Julie

Anne Julie is the most frequently cited woman maker in the Danish handmade pipe tradition. She did not come to this work by choice but after an unexpected loss: her husband, Poul Rasmussen, one of the well-known makers of his day, died in October 1967 at the age of forty-six, leaving behind a tobacco shop and a fully equipped workshop.

Twenty-seven-year-old Julie was raising a two-year-old child at the time; rather than sell the machinery and stock, she chose to take her place at the bench, and that choice marked the beginning of a body of work under her own name that would span more than fifty years.

Taking Over the Bench

According to the records, up to that point Julie had never even held a pipe; her husband belonged to a generation that regarded carving as men's work. During the days she went to sell the Copenhagen shop, she ran into one of Rasmussen's former apprentices, Hans Nielsen — a maker the pipe community knows by the name Former. The briar blocks sitting on the shelves drew the two of them into a shared undertaking; Julie carved her first pipes from these very blocks under Nielsen's guidance. In the years that followed, by her own account, she learned how the material behaved and how a shape was built on the job.