England, 1960s
Preben Holm wrote in his autobiographic article: “When I was called up for military service I had 18 pieces of these pipes which I was unable to sell. Therefore I left them in my father’s shop. One day when I returned home there was big news. An American, called Lon Schwartz had been calling. Lon Schwartz was making a purchase trip for his retail shop in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, USA. When he saw the 18 pipes he was very enthusiastic about them and bought them on the spot, placing at the same time orders for everything I could make against being entrusted with the monopoly in the entire U.S.A”.
The shop managed by Lon Schwartz was named “Pipe Lon” and they were ordering a lot (“millions” says Lon) of pipes from different sources: “English makers like Charatan, Barling, GBD and Comoy; some French brands, and Danish names such as Criswell and Stanwell”. Some pipes as we know were exclusively branded for Pipe Lon, they were stamped only with the shop name. There’s a very detailed article on Lon Schwartz and his business at rebornpipes.com https://rebornpipes.com/tag/pipe-lon-shop-virgin-islands.
So as we can see John Redman factory has been producing pipes for Pipe Lon too. Please welcome huge, unsmoked historical pipe made at John Redman plant for Pipe Lon!
The pipe markings are “Aristocrat \ LONDON MADE”, “SUPERMAN \ MADE IN ENGLAND”, “PIPE LON”. The length is 16.0 cm (4.96″), bowl’s height is 4.8 cm (1.54″). External diameter of the bowl is 4.3 cm (1.69″), internal diameter is 2.2 cm (0.79″). The depth is 4.1 cm (1.22″) and this pipe weights 49 gr. Briar, vulcanite stem, no filter.
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