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10 photographsArchive Record FUH-GRTH-HANN-H
undetermined
Reference example
This pipe is documented here as an example for study — it is a record in the archive, not an item offered for sale. Everything below is what the piece itself, and the evidence around it, will honestly support.
Original stem
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Stem replaced or re-cut
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Rim cleaned (no wood removed)
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Refinished
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Chamber reamed
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Smoked
Yes
owner stated
Facts, not a grade. We do not score a pipe out of ten: a number would rank a restored pipe above an honest one, and restoration is exactly what this hobby prices down. Every line above is checkable by anyone holding the pipe. Lines marked Faridunhill standing declaration rest on our published, dated statement of shop practice (v1.0, 2026-07-29) — not on an inspection of this individual pipe. It is one document, in public, that you can hold us to.
This reference example documents a German estate pipe from the Oldenkott ROYAL line: a smooth-finished bent billiard fitted with a nickel band, an army-mount stem joint, and a 9mm filter system. The Oldenkott name belongs to one of the older German tobacco houses, a firm whose roots lie in the eighteenth-century Rhineland tobacco trade; pipes bearing the marque were produced for the German domestic market, where the brand carried the familiarity of a long-established tobacco business rather than that of an artisan workshop.
The bent billiard is among the most enduring forms in pipe making — the classic billiard's cylindrical bowl and even walls, carried on a shank and stem given a curve that drops the bowl below the line of the bit. The bend shifts the pipe's weight closer to the hand and jaw, which is why the form has remained a staple of factory catalogues across Europe for well over a century.
Two construction details place this example squarely in the German tradition. The army mount, in which the stem's tenon seats into a metal-reinforced shank end — here banded in nickel — is a robust push-fit arrangement that allows the stem to be separated even when the pipe is warm, a feature long favoured on continental pipes. The 9mm filter bore is the defining convention of the German market, sized for the paper-and-charcoal filters that became standard equipment there through the twentieth century.
Dating rests on the ROYAL line stamping and the owner-stated German attribution. Oldenkott pipes do not carry a factory date-coding system of the kind used by a handful of English makers, so no single stamp fixes a year of manufacture. The 9mm army-mount configuration is consistent with mainstream twentieth-century German production, but absent a documented catalogue match the era of this example is recorded as undetermined, and the record is held open for future corroboration.
2023-04-29
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2023-04-29.
2023-05-08
Sold through Etsy for USD 48. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
5 checklist facts recorded under Faridunhill's standing declaration of shop practice (2026-07-29).
This record is append-only. Nothing is deleted — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both stay visible.
USD 48sold 2023-05-08 · Etsy
From 1 recorded sale — this pipe, this day. A single transaction is not a market price, and we will never print one as if it were.
The sample this sits in: Faridunhill has recorded 134 sales of Oldenkott between 2015–2026 — median $35, most falling between $24 and $55.
The date shown is the date of sale, not the date this page was published. Our own transaction record, published free. No buyer appears here — not a name, not initials, not a country. Counted across both of our channels — eBay 2015–2022 and Etsy 2022–2026 — so the series is continuous and a change of marketplace is never read as a change in price.
Nobody leaves empty-handed. If you hold the catalogue page, the dated advertisement, or a hallmarked sibling that closes one of these — or simply own this model and can measure yours — send it in. Contributions are checked, credited to you by name, and the record is updated with the date it changed.
Instagram post, 2023-04-29. Published to a third-party platform on that date and archived since — a timestamp we cannot move. It is evidence that this object existed and looked like this, then.
The photographs are the identity. 10 images of this pipe's grain, stamping and stem are held as its fingerprint. The handle above is only a handle: lose it, and the pipe can still be matched back to this record from its grain.