GBD Line Names and Quality Grades

GBD line names are the line names stamped onto the shanks of the brand's pipes. In identifying a GBD, collectors look first at this name and only then at the shape number. Born from the partnership of Ganneval, Bondier, and Donninger, the brand used more than a hundred line names over its lifetime, and for most of them neither a complete production record nor a reliable date list survives.

The Documents Behind the List

The most comprehensive record on the subject is the line list Jerry Hanna compiled for Perardua.net, which Pipedia republished with permission. Hanna's material draws on three sources: correspondence that circulated on the alt.smokers.pipes newsgroup in the 1990s, Herb Wilczak and Tom Colwell's 1997 reference book Who Made That Pipe?, and Oppenheimer GBD catalogues from the 1970s and early 1980s that he later acquired. The compiler states openly that the record remains incomplete; many lines today are known only by name, with no record of their finish.