Goldpoint Smooth Slightly Bent Acorn (S 14), German Estate — era undetermined

This reference example is a Goldpoint tobacco pipe of German origin, executed in a smooth finish and cut to the acorn shape with a slight bend, carrying the shape designation S 14. The acorn is one of the classic bowl profiles of the pipe-making repertoire: its chamber walls taper gently from a rounded shoulder toward a narrower heel, producing a silhouette reminiscent of the nut that lends the shape its name. Rendered here in a smooth surface treatment, the form allows the natural figure of the stummel material to read without interruption from rustication or sandblasting, while the slight bend of the stem line places the bowl marginally forward of the bit — a geometry long favoured for its balance between the upright presence of a straight pipe and the jaw comfort of a fuller bend. Germany maintains one of Europe's most established pipe-making traditions, with production historically concentrated in regions such as the Black Forest town of Kaufbeuren-Neugablonz and, before that, the workshops of Nuremberg and Uslar; German factories are particularly associated with systematised shape numbering of the kind seen in the S 14 designation, a cataloguing convention that ties an individual pipe to a fixed pattern in a maker's chart rather than to a one-off design. The Goldpoint name itself is not among the widely documented marques with published date-coding systems, and the pipe carries no factory dating device that would fix its year of manufacture. Its dating therefore rests on the owner's classification of the piece as a German estate pipe — an item that has passed through prior use and ownership — together with the shape stamp itself, leaving the era of production honestly undetermined within the broader span of twentieth-century German factory pipe making.