Arthur Leonard (Leonard's Pipe Shop)

Arthur Leonard was the proprietor who opened his eponymous tobacco shop in Portland, in the American state of Oregon, in 1936. Known to locals simply as Leonard's, the shop never achieved the fame of the great East Coast names in American pipe retailing; it nonetheless carved out a distinctive place for itself in pipe collecting. What earned it that place was not so much what sat in its display case as the direct ties the business built with manufacturers.

A Relationship Built With Suppliers

From the shop's earliest years, Leonard chose to deal personally with the great pipe houses of the day. Its shelves and stock ledgers carried names such as Charatan, Barling, Sasieni, Kaywoodie, and Comoy's. The tangible result of this relationship was a run of pieces both large and unusual, well beyond the reach of an ordinary shop: outsized late-1930s Kaywoodies, huge-chambered models evidently made to special order, and unsmoked Dunhill Magnums held for years in their original boxes.

By all accounts, one of the shop's most notable orders was placed with Charatan. In the 1950s and 1960s, as interest in the meerschaum-lined pipe grew even as Türkiye restricted the export of raw meerschaum, Leonard's commissioned fifty Charatans with meerschaum-lined bowls; according to Lou Leonard, of the next generation of owners, only about thirty-five of these could ever be delivered.