Prospecting for Antique Shop Treasures…

Pipe smokers keep asking me how I keep finding good pipes at antique shops, malls and junk shops. My answer is always, “Just dumb, blind luck,” and that is the Truth. I’ve come to the conclusion, that I go looking for a pipe, I don’t find one. For some reason, I seem to have more success just going into a shop without expectation of finding anything.

That’s how I found a motherlode of estate pipes (relatively speaking) the last week in April while in northeast Tennessee. We were in Johnson City, staying with our teenage grandsons while our son and daughter-in-law were out of town. With the boys in school, we visited antique shops and malls in the area. On Thursday, we drove the 23 miles to Kingsport to look around.

P&J Antiques

Our first stop was P&J Antiques (204 Broad Street) https://www.facebook.com/pandjantiqueskingsport/.

This place is very big and antique hunters can easily spend three or four hours wandering around the two-floor shop. Less than five minutes and maybe 50 steps from the entrance I found a display case with about 20 pipes. Another 30 feet down the aisle and another booth had a case with another 20 pipes. I also saw another five or six pipes in other booths.

As usual, some of the pipes were Medico’s, Grabows and Kaywoodies, but there were enough other pipes to warrant having the shop manager open the cases. The first pipe I picked up was a big, old Nording freehand priced at $99. The case also had a Barling, a Peterson and a Savinelli with $39 or $49 price tags. I then picked up a pipe with a Vulcanite stem. It was a Dunhill Red Bark 415 and the asking price was $59. I told the shop worker I would have to think about it, and she said, “I’ll give you a discount…”

Without a doubt, I bought the Dunhill. I guess that’s why I didn’t look at the rest of the pipes more carefully and didn’t see the Comoy or the Sasieni 4 Dot pipes in the next case. The Sasieni and another pipe was purchased the next day by a New Orleans Pipe Club member who lives between Kingsport and Johnson City.

Visiting other shops

P&J’s isn’t the only antique shop in Kingsport or in that area, but it did have the best selection of “estate” pipes I’ve ever seen outside of a cigar & pipe shop. The Tri-City area of Kingsport, Bristol and Johnson City has a goodly number of antique shops, malls and flea markets and many of them have some type of tobacciana collectibles. One shop, in Bristol, had two nice, wooden tobacco stands with copper-lined humidors, for example. I also saw a number of vintage tobacco tins and some pipe stands with tobacco jars. My only other purchase was a 3-pipe stand with a marble base though.

My 1976 Dunhill Red Bark…

The Dunhill Red Bark I bought, had me doing some research at first because the stamping on the bottom didn’t completely match my expectations. It is stamped Dunhill over Made in England16 and the numbers 415, but there are no other marks. I expected it to have ODA and F/T also stamped on the bowl, but it didn’t. That being said, I had it confirmed as being a Group 4, Tapered Stem, Dublin.

The restoration of the pipe to smoking condition went quickly with most of the time spent waiting for the two bowl treatments to do their thing. After a good reaming to remove the rough cake in the bowl, I used cotton balls soaked in alcohol for almost 24 hours. I followed that with packing the bowl with damp coffee grounds for another 12 hours. This left the bowl with a slight coffee smell but no old tobacco odor.

In the meantime, I soaked the stem in a warm Oxyclean solution to soften the oxidation. My method of removing the oxidation started with 600-grit wet sandpaper and working my way up to 12,000 grit micro-mesh pads. The final step was applying Walker Briar Works Pipe Stem Deoxidizer/Cleaner and Carnauba Wax Polish/Sealer.

I thought it was only fitting to open my tin of Dunhill Apertif for my initial smoke in the pipe.

© J. Gibson Creative Services. May 5, 2019