I’ve been collecting Wally Frank pipes for a while now. It was the old catalogs that pulled me in. If you’ve never read through one, you should. Wally Frank didn’t sell pipes. They sold stories and it was the stories sold the pipes. So, the last pipe that I’ll be doing for myself for a while is this Wally Frank Collector.
From the catalog description…
“We present these beautiful pipes in a number of unusual shapes for the collector. The shapes have been selected according to popularity from our Pipes of the Month. Made from genuine Corsican Briar Root, these Pipes are finished in a light Sun tan color. Each pipe is hand mounted with a beautiful quality Vulcanite mouthpiece, and equipped with a special double ball dry smoking condenser tube.”
An interesting note is that the words “Corsican Briar Root” were replaced with “North Carolina burl root” during the war years.
Both the Pipe of the Month Club and the Collector series appear to have been discontinued in the early-’60s. This pipe is a perfect match for Weber’s shape #143. So, I’m assuming that the pipe was sold near the tail end of that run. No condenser tube in this one, but some shapes didn’t have them and the tubes may not have been used at all by the time this pipe was made. Instead, the pipe is equipped with a small, hourglass-shaped doohickey made from either some type of wood or bone that has been stained over the years. I honestly can’t tell, even after inspecting it under a 60x loupe.
From the catalog description…
“We present these beautiful pipes in a number of unusual shapes for the collector. The shapes have been selected according to popularity from our Pipes of the Month. Made from genuine Corsican Briar Root, these Pipes are finished in a light Sun tan color. Each pipe is hand mounted with a beautiful quality Vulcanite mouthpiece, and equipped with a special double ball dry smoking condenser tube.”
An interesting note is that the words “Corsican Briar Root” were replaced with “North Carolina burl root” during the war years.
Both the Pipe of the Month Club and the Collector series appear to have been discontinued in the early-’60s. This pipe is a perfect match for Weber’s shape #143. So, I’m assuming that the pipe was sold near the tail end of that run. No condenser tube in this one, but some shapes didn’t have them and the tubes may not have been used at all by the time this pipe was made. Instead, the pipe is equipped with a small, hourglass-shaped doohickey made from either some type of wood or bone that has been stained over the years. I honestly can’t tell, even after inspecting it under a 60x loupe.