Tinned Tobacco Dating to the 1970S and 1980S

Tinned tobacco dating to the 1970s and 1980s is the subject of a compilation in which John C. Loring gathered the pipe tobacco tins of these two decades into a single table. The piece carries Loring's byline; its Pipedia version carries a contribution from Yang Forcióri. The work does not describe a dating method; it gives a record of tins held in hand, and reads more like a ledger of evidence than a set of method guides.

Layout of the Table

The record has six columns: maker, brand or blend name, tin type, weight, date, and the number of tins matching that description. Over thirty makers are named across more than two hundred rows, and the total of tins counted exceeds six hundred. By row count, the leading headings are, in order, Dunhill, Rattray's, and Balkan Sobranie.

A five-abbreviation key is given for the tin type column. The great majority of rows are CT: a lid twisted open with a coin (coin twist). Second is PT, opened by pulling a ring (pop top). The rest are a handful of rows: LT, a lever-opened lid (lever top), and ST, a canister without an airtight lid, appear only a few times each, while KL, the knife lid defined in the key, does not appear at all. In some rows, the lid color is also added to the CT entry.

A working assumption is stated at the head of the table: unless noted otherwise, the blend is taken to have been made in England. This is why a country is added next to the maker's name; Lane and Drucquer's are marked "USA," Niemeyer "Netherlands," Gallaher's and Murray's "Northern Ireland," Rattray's and Cotton "Scotland." American shop names carrying no country note, by the table's own rule, are taken as English-made; the blends Robert McConnell prepared for Leavitt & Peirce, located at Harvard Square in Massachusetts, appear across four separate rows.