Cuttying to the Quick

For pipe smokers, especially among those who feel a strong connection to things nautical or historical, the cutty is a beloved shape,  perhaps because the shape’s roots are thought to emerge from the earliest of smoking pipes: clay tavern pipes that preceded briar pipes by almost two centuries. You see at the top of this post a rare Comoy Blue Riband Shape No. 347, a briar pipe with design elements that echo its tavern-pipe predecessor: forward cant, casting nipple, and egg-ish bowl shape.

Given how the pipe’s look seems so proximal to its clay pipe origins, one might assume that the Comoy’s 347 shape is the oldest of the cutty shapes the company made, but that’s not the case.

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Finding your favorite shape.

When one considers the diversity of pipe shapes available to the pipe smoker, it’s a bit overwhelming. There are well over a hundred classic pipe shapes, alone. And there are seemingly endless variations on and interpretations of classic shapes that, in some cases, have supplanted the original versions; they are so popular.

Consider the simple billiard. There are chubby billiards, long-stemmed billiards, nosewarmer billiards, classic LB billiards, eighth-bent billiards, quarter-bent billiards, full-bent billiards, long-shanked billiards, bamboo versions of many of the above, saddle-stemmed billiards, tapered stem billiards, stacked billiards, bamboo-stacked billiards, Bing billiards, group 2 billiards, magnum billiards, and on and on and on.

Then, there are the signature shapes, finishes, bowl shapes, varying stem materials, decorative treatments, shank rings, etc., that various makers use to put their personal aesthetic stamp on the shape.

Even factories design and produce idiosyncratically singular versions of a shape. A Comoy zulu differs from its Dunhill, GBD, BBB, Peterson, and Kaywoodie cousins in shank length, bowl cant, stem taper, size, bowl flare, and chamber dimensions. These are all differences that make a difference.

It makes the head swim. So, given the profusion of shape choices and variation available, how do we find what suits us best? How do we choose? How do we find that shape that delights us?

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