TotemStar: a Visual Artist's Los Angeles Bench

TotemStar is the brand name under which Los Angeles-based visual artist Gunnar Weber-Prada gathers his pipes and pipe accessories. Weber-Prada's primary field is drawing, painting, photography, and film; he only came to the bench in his late thirties. For this reason the brand is remembered less as a mass-production workshop than as a personal working space where someone engaged in design experiments with the formal possibilities of the pipe.

No exact founding year is given; the dates of his first products and first exhibition place the brand in the mid-2000s.

Stamp and Grading

On TotemStar pipes, the brand name is stamped within an oval frame. An emblem called RedLine also appears on the stem; the lines of this emblem are noted to be noticeably thicker on examples from the first two years of production, as also seen on pipe number 001.

The quality grade is repeated a second time through metal dots inlaid into the stem near the shank. The ranking rises from copper to silver, then to gold and platinum; records indicate each metal has its own three intermediate steps distinguished by the number of dots. In this way, the distinction made according to the grain and blemish condition of the briar block becomes a legible mark for anyone looking at the pipe.