Research Resources for Tobacco and Pipe-Industry History

Research resources for tobacco and pipe-industry history fall into two quite different piles. On one side sit the millions of pages of internal corporate documents opened up by court rulings over the last thirty years; on the other, the books, catalogues, and ephemera that libraries and museums have been accumulating for a century.

The first tells the story of the cigarette industry's recent past, the second the long history of tobacco and pipe craftsmanship. The two rarely live in the same place, and a researcher's job is often to move back and forth between them.

Libraries Born From Litigation

The report issued by Britain's Royal College of Physicians on 7 March 1962, together with the US Surgeon General's Smoking and Health report of 11 January 1964, fundamentally reshaped the public debate over tobacco. Decades of litigation culminated in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which obligated companies to make their internal correspondence public. These documents are held at a library on the University of California, San Francisco campus. Digitization began in 1995, and the collection was formalized in the early 2000s as the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, later renamed the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents; today it holds more than nineteen million documents along with over eight thousand audio and video recordings. It also houses the records of the Tobacco Institute, founded in 1958 and dissolved in 1998 under the same settlement. Even so, this archive's center of gravity is cigarettes; a researcher working on pipe manufacturing usually won't find much of what they're looking for here.