Arne Ljung

Arne Ljung (1913-1998) was one of the first representatives of the handmade pipe tradition in postwar Sweden. He spent most of his adult life in the business world, serving as general manager of an automobile company. A serious illness diagnosed in the 1960s led him to leave this position; records indicate that around 1963, as a man past fifty, he turned the hobby he had pursued for years into a livelihood.

A Late-Starting Bench

What makes Ljung's story unusual is not only the age at which he entered the trade but the circumstances behind it. His illness lasted more than thirty years, but according to accounts it left the master too weak to work only in his final year. In other words, the bench operated without interruption for thirty years after the diagnosis. Throughout this long period, production was carried on single-handedly and at small scale; there was no staff working alongside Ljung, nor a workshop carrying his name forward.

In the Sweden of the time, there was almost no pipe maker working under his own name; production in the country lay largely in the hands of factory operations such as Svenska Rökpipfabriken. Ljung states in his own promotional texts that he was Sweden's only pipe maker and the first to offer hobby-level pipe-making lessons. These courses are said to have been held in Limhamn, near Malmö. Ljung is thus regarded as a starting point who paved the way for the later generation of Swedish masters, such as Bo Nordh.