Pipes and Tobacco in the Old Trade Press: Facts and Legends

Pipes and tobacco in the old trade press covers the pipe-related records accumulated in trade journals, consular and commercial reports, and industrial encyclopedias from the mid-19th century to the first quarter of the 20th. This body of material is considered the main artery of pipe historiography; it speaks in the language of the workshop, the timber yard, and the customs ledger. The same pages also carry the earliest known written trace of several origin legends still in circulation today.

American pipe writer Ben Rapaport's selection of excerpts, published on Pipedia and gathered from scattered periodicals, displays this dual character with its collected examples.

Pages That Speak in Numbers

These publications are most solid where they describe the countable. A tobacco history from 1901 records that roughly forty tons of raw briar arrived in London annually, and that Nuremberg and Ruhla each turned out half a million pipes a year. A forestry journal from the same year notes that the blocks were cut to about twenty-five sizes across three basic shapes ("Marseillaise," "Relevé," and "Belgian"). A 1921 US Department of Commerce report states that roughly six thousand tons of root were extracted annually in Corsica, and that of the 1,813 tons of raw block that left the island in 1911, 1,505 tons went to Saint-Claude. A 1936 woodworking manual reports that blocks, boiled and dried for months and then rested for up to two years, were cut into seventy distinct sizes, yielding between seven hundred and nine hundred models. Each of these figures rests on a single period publication; none has been independently tested.