I’ve been reading old issues of Pipe Lover’s Magazine, and one fact intrigues me. The US government set up countless agencies to continue the supply of consumer goods and control inflation, and in the case of briar pipes found before the war the USA manufactured and sold 30 million imported briar pipes a year, and the average pipe smoker bought three new pipes a year.
The 1940 population was 132 million.
Kaywoodie advertised selling 11 million pipes a year in the late thirties, the cheapest being $3.50, when a decent briar pipe was fifty cents.
In the event the government price controlled briar pipes but they were not rationed.
The old sources agree that manzanita from California was the closest substitute for imported briar, and second was myrtle from the Appalachian area. These could be sold as “briar” but not “imported briar”. A survey in 1946 found over half the new pipes offered were of “domestic briar”.
Every other wood imaginable was tried, olive among them.
In 1946 it was speculated that “domestic briar” would continue to have a market for cheaper pipes, but in a few years there were none, except the cheap hardwood pipes made by corn cob makers.
The more Marxman pipes I buy the more I am certain that briar harvested from the windswept desert hills of Algeria made the finest smoking (and perhaps the ugliest) briar and all other briar from the Mediterranean is less savory and probably easier to carve a beautiful pipe from.
But there was, and is, no good substitute for Mediterranean briar.
They’d have found it in 1943.
Another thing I’m convinced of.
The makers of $5 pipes in a world where a good pipe cost fifty cents were not 100% status symbol peddlers.
They knew which particular briar smoked better.
You can’t fool that many millions of pipe smokers.
