Turkish Meerschaum Smooth Billiard with 18K Gold-Plated Band, Vintage (Era Undetermined)

This reference example is a handmade Turkish meerschaum pipe carved in the straight billiard form, presented with a smooth finish and dressed at the shank with an 18K gold-plated band. The billiard is the most fundamental shape in the pipe-making canon: a cylindrical bowl set at a right angle to a straight shank, with the stem continuing the shank's line to the bit. In meerschaum, the shape takes on a different character than in — the mineral's light weight and porosity allow generous proportions without penalty, and the smooth surface displays the stone's creamy uniformity to full effect. The bit on this example is described in the mixed idiom of the trade as a fishtail / P-lip type; the fishtail spreads laterally into a flattened button, while the P-lip — a design historically associated with Peterson of Dublin — directs smoke upward through a bore in the top of the button. The pipe is configured without a filter system. Meerschaum, the hydrated magnesium silicate sepiolite, has been quarried principally around Eskişehir in Anatolia since the eighteenth century, and Turkish workshops remain the historic centre of block-meerschaum carving. A gold-plated band of this kind serves both as ornament and as reinforcement at the shank-stem junction, a convention carried over from silver-mounted work.