IDEA Smooth Black Straight Billiard, Army Mount, 9mm (Italy) — era undetermined

This reference example is a straight billiard by the Italian marque IDEA, finished smooth and stained black, and fitted with an army mount and a 9mm filter system. The example is accompanied by its original sleeve and box, a detail worth preserving in the record, as period packaging often outlives its association with the pipe it once housed. The billiard is the foundational shape of the era: a cylindrical bowl set at roughly a right angle to a shank of about equal length, with the whole pipe reading as a single balanced line. It is the form against which most other shapes are defined, and a smooth black rendering of it represents the shape at its most austere. The army mount — also called a military mount — is a construction in which the stem's tenon is replaced by a tapered push fit into a reinforced shank end, a design tracing its popular lineage to soldiers' pipes that could be separated warm and carried safely in a pocket. The 9mm filter channel is the standard of continental European pipe making, sized to accept the charcoal filters that dominate the German and broader European market, and its presence here places the pipe firmly within that continental smoking tradition. Italy stands with England, France, and Denmark among the historic centres of serially produced smoking pipes, with a manufacturing tradition concentrated in regions with access to Mediterranean . The IDEA name belongs to that Italian production landscape, though detailed factory documentation for the marque is thin in the standard references. Dating rests on the country attribution given with the example. The pipe carries no factory date-coding system of the kind used by certain English houses, so no year of manufacture can be responsibly assigned; the era of this example is recorded as undetermined.