Each briar pipe is made in the Dublin factory by skilled craftsmen and enjoyed the world over. Over 100,000 pipes are made every year at the Peterson factory; traditionally most are smoked in the UK & Europe, but increasingly more are being enjoyed by smoker’s worldwide. They have also had a full lineup of tobaccos that the P&C Faithful have flocked to for years. Then, recently, they added a bunch of the previously Dunhill-branded tobaccos, like My Mixture 965, Nightcap, Early Morning, Elizabethan Mixture, De Luxe Navy Rolls, Peterson Flake, and The Royal Yacht Pipe Tobacco. These are all in addition to their classic lines like Sweet Killarney, Sunset Breeze, Irish Flake, Peterson 3 P's, and more. This is the short story of a small, pencil-shanked shape that’s peculiarly Irish yet rarely seen, even in the Peterson catalog. The shape’s name seems to depend on what type of stem is attached to the end of the bowl—zulu, churchwarden or dublin. Jeff and I picked up this collection of older pipes that came from an older professor who taught in Eastern Europe and still does when he can get there. There are a broad assortment of meerschaums, clays and some briars. The bowls usually showed no nomenclature indicating the orderer. “Genuine Block Meerschaum” was engraved frequently. Often, just the stems were different, while bowls were the same. A while back I received a small box of pipes from a fellow pipeman who wanted to donate them to support  the non-profit organization I work for – the SA Foundation (). The organization has been providing long term recovery, housing and job training for women who have escaped sexual exploitation and trafficking. For over thirty years the work has gone on and thousands of young women and their children have been empowered to start over with skills and options. They soon made a name for themselves making and selling quality Meerschaum and Briar Root pipes. One day Charles Peterson walked into the Kapp Brothers’ Grafton Street premises armed with a revolutionary tobacco pipe and ambitious plans for the future. Peterson suggested that the brothers go into partnership with him to turn his smoking pipe into the world’s best briar pipe. They agreed and the company was renamed Kapp & Peterson. Kapp and Peterson went on to become Dublin’s most fashionable and respected manufacturer and purveyor of fine tobacco smoking products. It had once been a beautiful pipe with an acrylic stem but it had long before lost its charm. The sides of the bowl were beat up and the rim top was also beat up. There was a thick cake of lava on the rim top and the bowl was out of round. The cake in the bowl was also out of round and heavier on the left side than the rest. The next pipe that I selected to work on is a beautiful classic billiard shaped Peterson’s pipe with a P-lip tapered stem. The very appearance of this pipe shouted “ol’ timer” to me even before I saw the stampings. The size also indicated that this pipe was from an era when large bowl were not in vogue, specifically the English made. While crafting quality, innovative tobacco pipes has been central to our brand, we understand the importance of possessing smoking accessories of the same calibre. The three stamps resurfaced on the copper-plated Christmas pipe mounts beginning in 2019 and and continuing through 2022 (the date of this revision). The practice of stamping sterling with the date letter wasn’t resumed at Peterson until 1969, for rather humorous reasons you can read about in the Peterson book. Pipe smokers new to Peterson sometimes wonder what the “K&P” stamp is all about, not realizing the company was known as “Kapp & Peterson” until the 1970s and is still referred to as “Kapps” by the old hands in the shop. Usually Peterson metal stampings and bowl stampings aren’t difficult to decipher, but I’d recommend at the outset using some kind of strong magnification loupe. Jeweler’s hand-held loupes are usually not quite strong enough to do the job.