The Globalization of Pipe Literature

The globalization of pipe literature refers to books written on pipes and tobacco reaching beyond the language in which they were written, arriving at other reading communities through translation or bilingual editions. The field has always been small: pipe books have never at any point been a high-circulation publishing category, and their translations have likewise remained few.

Even so, there has been a translation traffic running almost uninterrupted for close to a century. A compilation published by American researcher Ben Rapaport in 2022, later expanded, made the scale of this traffic visible by gathering the multilingual editions of some fifty authors into a single list.

Multilingual Classics

The field's titles most often carried into other languages are also among its oldest. Egon Caesar Corti's history of tobacco, written in German, was translated into English as A History of Smoking in 1931 and reprinted in 1996. Dunhill brand founder Alfred Dunhill's 1924 book The Pipe Book is among the earliest titles on the list; records show the book was translated into Japanese in 1971 and into German in 1982, while the same author's 1954 book The Gentle Art of Smoking saw Spanish and Danish editions the following year. Spanish writer Joaquín Verdaguer's book on the art of pipe smoking appeared in German, then Swedish, and finally in English in 1958 as The Art of Pipe Smoking. Georges Herment's 1952 Traité de la Pipe took the English title The Pipe two years later; Alexis Liebaert and Alain Maya's extensive history, published in French in 1993, entered circulation in a single year, 1994, in German, English, and Italian editions. J. M. Barrie's 1890 humorous book My Lady Nicotine, meanwhile, found its translators only after a delay of more than a century; its Italian, French, and German editions have been published within the last twenty years.