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6 photographsArchive Record FUH-VP7P-4BBT-9
Era 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 is a smooth-finished straight billiard bearing the single stamped name STANDARD, catalogued from a miscellaneous estate group. It is preserved in the archive as a study piece for the most common category of pipe encountered in the trade: the anonymous or semi-anonymous factory billiard that formed the everyday backbone of pipe smoking through the twentieth century.
The billiard is the archetypal shape of the modern pipe canon — a cylindrical bowl set at roughly a right angle to a straight shank of about the bowl's own height, finished with a straight stem in line with the shank. Because it is the baseline against which nearly every other classic shape is defined, the billiard was produced in enormous numbers by virtually every factory in England, France, Italy, Denmark, and beyond, from the highest artisan grades down to inexpensive drugstore lines. A smooth finish on such a pipe indicates the stummel was buffed and stained rather than sandblasted or rusticated, the standard treatment for the broad middle of the market.
The name STANDARD illustrates an important lesson in pipe attribution. Words of this kind — Standard, Special, Select, De Luxe — were used as line or grade designations by a great many unrelated makers, and such a stamping does not by itself identify a factory, a country of origin, or a production date. Unlike the makers who employed systematic date codes, a pipe marked only in this generic fashion must be bracketed broadly. On the strength of its form, finish, and trade-name stamping, this example is assigned to the twentieth century without a narrower era, an honest and typical outcome for estate-sourced factory billiards of this class. It stands in the encyclopedia as a representative baseline specimen of the everyman's smooth straight billiard.
2023-02-19
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2023-02-19.
2023-10-25
Sold through Etsy for USD 29. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
5 checklist facts recorded under Faridunhill's standing declaration of shop practice (2026-07-29).
2026-08-28
Honesty pass: statements the source does not support were removed (era 'twentieth century, undetermined' -> undetermined).
This record is append-only. Nothing is deleted — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both stay visible.
USD 29sold 2023-10-25 · 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 160 sales of STANDARD between 2015–2026 — median $75, most falling between $25 and $125.
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, 2023-02-19. 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. 6 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.