Bo Nordh

Nordh is the brand name under which Swedish master Bo Nordh (1941-2006) stamped his handmade pipes with his own name. With no factory tradition in his country, Nordh completed only a few dozen pipes a year at his one-man bench; even so, the shapes he developed entered the shared vocabulary of Scandinavian handmade pipemaking. His name is today the first mentioned when pipemaking in Sweden comes up.

From Accident to the Bench

Nordh's move into pipemaking was not a planned career choice but the result of a necessity. A motorcycle accident in his youth confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life and forced him to give up the trade he had been pursuing at the time; records indicate the accident occurred in 1959, when he was eighteen. He went on to study mechanical engineering, but could not find work because of his condition. In the early 1970s, on his wife Birgit's suggestion, he bought ready-drilled briar blocks sold to amateurs at the Pip-Larsson tobacconist in Malmö.

All of his first blocks were ruined; trying to sand away every flaw left no wood behind to make a pipe from. The conclusion Nordh drew from these early attempts set the method for the next thirty years: there is no such thing as a flawless block, so the shape must be built around the flaw. When shop owner Olle Jonsson saw the results, he suggested Nordh have his own mark made and put the pipes in the window; the first batch found buyers quickly.