Hi Guys,
Well, well, look at that. The Chinese have stolen yet another piece of intellectual property, this time mine, in publishing my copyrighted restoration of the Barling catalog. China is the world leader in IP theft. It's what they do.
Had the POS who runs this site had the integrity of character to contact me and ask permission, I would have given it. I restored and published this catalog to preserve its contents from disappearing so that other pipe enthusiasts could benefit from it. But the person who runs this site is a well intentioned, but thieving POS, and didn't ask.
Moving on then...
This is the catalog that Hacker categorically stated did not exist.
Oooops...
So, a little about this catalog. I bought it in 2013 with the intention of doing a digital restoration and publishing it so that its contents would not be lost to others interested in the history of the British pipe trade. As far as I know, mine is the only complete copy of this catalog known to exist. There are a few partial copies that have popped up. Loring included a portion in his xerox publication of a selection of catalogs
Mine survived because it was one of two surviving reference copies that were in the company's archives following the company's sale. I bought it from a former director of the Barling company. He had worked under Ron Harden and later been made a director. So I'm assuming that this catalog was saved when the factories were shuttered around 1970.
The original is nowhere in this kind of pristine condition. In addition to the usual results of aging, it has seen quite a bit of use, so there were creases where the pages had been dog earred, some water damage, some rust staining from the staples that had held it together also resulting in some of the paper rotting away around the staples, etc. The outside front cover had been cancelled with a large in "X" across it. There was also some company marginalia on a number of the pages. In addition, there was some occasional ink bleed through that obscured some of the detailing in the illustrations.
I had the original conserved and stabilized, and while the leaves were separated, I borrowed them back to make high resolution scans, for which purpose I bought a new high end scanner.
About 150 hours of very painstaking work went into producing the restoration. I was literally painting back in paper around the ink. The goal was to not touch the actual ink on a page, but to remove the errata, the damage, resulting in a reproduction of the book as it appeared when it was new. I had the original to reference for all of the color and tonal values. The original is stored away and I intend to donate it to a library, probably the Huntington, so that it doesn't disappear into someones library.
The catalog is a small slim volume, about 8 1/2 by 5 3/4 " and 28 pages. All pipes illustrated therein are produced at 2/3 scale.
The catalog doesn't include every model Barling made, alas, but their most popular models and was intended to be given out to their dealers and their best customers.
There were a number of things the contents revealed that we hadn't known. For one thing, Barling named their models. For another, Barling used a completely different model numbering system than the familiar four digit British numbers and the three digit Nichols numbers. With the help of this catalog and other dips in the river, I've been able to build a very rough chronology for the model numbering system. These are "Pre-Nichols" numbers. You may occasionally read some ad copy on a commercial pipesite regarding "Pre-Nichols" numbers, and they're talking (or writing in this case) out their ass.
One of you noted that every pipe has a silver band of some kind. Prior to WW1 that was very much the fashion. Bling was king. Look at other catalogs of the period and you will see much the same thing. Pipe bling became less of a thing in the early 1920's.
As a matter of interest, Barling published catalogs earlier and later than this one, besides the two well known 1962 catalogs. If copies exist of their 1904 catalog, or anything from the '30's it hasn't come to public light. We know they issued catalogs because surviving newspaper advertisements mention them.
In answer to when Barling began making their own pipes, it is a two part answer. They were pipe mounters from the beginning, 1815 according to research by Jon Guss, and not 1812 as the company claims. In any event, they were nearly a century old when Dunhill started their own pipe business.
Like all other British companies Barling imported unfinished stummels from France and fitted them with stems and did the finishing work. The generally accepted year for when Barling began making some of their own pipes from scratch is 1895 because it's the earliest year that a "Barling's Make" stamp can be dated by the sterling hallmarks on the band. They converted to wholy making all of their pipes starting in 1906, in the wake of the St Claude carvers' strike.
I'm going to give my 71A a good internal cleaning right now for use later tonight/tomorrow.
