I would say there is a distinction between number of blends available and number available to an individual. In the 70s, I could go into a newsstand or drug store and probably find a dozen or more blends. In a well-stocked tobacconist, probably 40 or 50 blends. I suspect that there were thousands on the market, but many were not represented in any particular market area.
Point well taken.
There may be more blends today, but many have them have been purchased by other companies and are being made in different countries than they were originally. England at one time had very strict laws in what you could add to tobacco which was why not many aromatic blends originated in England in that time period. Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Holland had different laws and were able to add more sugar and sweetness to blends then the English.
But the buying and selling a brand names has been going on for years. I have a book with Imperial Tobacco advertising art that has in it an ad for Capstan from the late 1800s. It's two sourdoughs in the Yukon, both smoking pipes and one of them holding a can of Will's Captain. The other one holds out a handful of gold nuggets and the caption reads,"I will give you this handful of nuggets for that last can of Will's Capstan."
At some point, Imperial Tobacco purchased he rights to the name and I'm assuming the blend as well. I'm imagine the Capstan I loved in the 1980s it was different than the Capstan purchased in the 1890s.
Just as I can notice subtle differences between the Capstan blue I get today made by Mac Barens, but it is close enough that I smoke it on a regular basis.
As for how many Blends were available in the 1970s and 1980s, I really don't know but there were at least hundreds available in the US. That's a lot of inventory to stock unless you have a large mail order clientele. The advent of the internet and online ordering has no doubt increased the demand for some of these rarely seen blends, enough that a company with a large mail order business could afford to stock them. That was not the case when I was managing three stores in Oregon in the 1980s and early 90s. We had probably 40 bulk tobaccos, primarily Lane Limited, Peter Stokkebye, and McClelland. There were other producers of bulk tobacco that were less expensive, but even when we tried them unlimited basis they were not popular sellers. In addition to the bulk tobaccos we carried probably 25 or 30 facings of American tinned or pouched tobaccos and probably 40 facings of imported tins. In our smaller stores we carried fewer of the imported tins because they didn't sell as well, and if we had a customer who wanted some an inner store transfer was very easy.
I believe the internet has substantially changed the tobacco consuming habits of pipe smokers and with local taxes, it is very difficult for the local small B&M store to stock even as much tinned tobacco as we did. Many of them have high local taxes and cannot match the price available on the internet. But when I am traveling I enjoy visiting local pipe shops and talking to the Proprietors. I met one gentleman and Anchorage who had been in the tobacco business since he was a young man and he was probably in his sixties now. We had a very interesting discussion about what used to be, and what is now. It would be very difficult to do the kind of volume sales we did in the 1980s given the current market situation. And the delightful new companies that have arrived on the scene since then like Cornell and Dietz, Newminster, have added some very delightful blends to my cellar. And while I miss the presence of McClelland tobacco's I am delighted to see that Stokkebye has some nice Virginia flake and va/pr blends.
It has been said that the only constant is change, and that seems to be the case or the pipe and pipe tobacco industry, but for the most part, I think I can live and thrive with the changes.
