John C. Loring

John C. Loring (1944-2009) was an American pipe collector and researcher known for his work on dating Dunhill (White Spot) pipes. According to his obituary, he was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and practiced law as his profession. His approach of laying stamp forms, period catalogues, and patent records side by side and cross-checking them is regarded as one of the steps that moved Dunhill scholarship from anecdote to documented evidence.

The Dunhill Book

The work that made his name, first published in June 1998, was "The Dunhill Briar Pipe – the patent years and after," considered the first book devoted solely to the Dunhill pipe. The "patent years" of the title refer to the period before 1955, when the firm stamped patent numbers on its pipes. The book is not merely a dating guide: it treats the evolution of the stamps alongside the brand's development from 1905 onward.

What set the guide apart from its predecessors was the direction from which the problem was approached. Earlier guides started from the year and described that year's stamp; Loring reversed the direction, letting the reader work from the stamp in hand to the year. There was a practical reason for this: the collector has the stamp, not the year, in front of them. For pipes with no date code at all, or one too worn to read, patent number and nomenclature tables were compiled separately; these tables serve to place a pipe within a range of a few years. Loring concluded that Dunhill adopted the dating-code practice within 1921, and that regular stamping of the code on pipes became widespread the following year; this distinction is decisive for dating early, code-less examples. The book also contains criteria for dating Parker-branded pipes, boxed Dunhill tobaccos, and pipe accessories. There is not a single photograph in the text; Loring explained this as a preference for circulating the information he had without delay.