Lange's Imported, Made in London England - Smooth Bent Billiard Estate Pipe, Vulcanite Stem, 9mm Filter

This bowl has never been lit. The seller notes the only trace of age on it is a faint dust smell and a few tiny storage dents - the honest residue of decades in a drawer, not a pipe rack.

The shank carries a single stamp, read directly off the pipe: Lange's Imported, Made in London England. Beyond that stamping we hold no independent record of the firm, so we name it here exactly as it appears and say nothing further about it. The pipe itself is a large-bowled, smooth-finished bent billiard, fitted with a tapered vulcanite stem cut with a fishtail slot and bored for a 9mm filter.

THE MARKS
- Stamped: Lange's Imported, Made in London England

The billiard is the shape every other bowl gets measured against: a cylindrical chamber rising straight from a flat base, on a shank that here carries a bend rather than running dead straight. A bent billiard trades the ramrod line of the straight version for a stem that drops the bit toward the jaw, letting the bowl hang level in a relaxed grip - useful for a smoker who holds a pipe through a long sitting rather than clenching it in the teeth throughout. At 44mm across and 45mm deep this is a genuinely large chamber; it holds enough tobacco for an extended smoke and will run warmer through the second half of the bowl than a smaller one, simply because there is more burning surface generating heat with less briar around it to draw that heat away.

The tapered vulcanite stem narrows evenly from shank to button, a traditional profile that keeps more material, and more flex, near the shank than a saddle-cut stem allows. Its fishtail slot, a shallow V cut into the button rather than a single round hole, spreads the draw across a wider opening and is the cut most often paired with a filter bore, since it resists the narrow, tunnel-like draw a round hole can produce once a filter cartridge is seated behind it. The 9mm bore itself is a filter format rather than a tobacco-chamber measurement: it accepts a cellulose or charcoal cartridge, which cools and dries the smoke before it reaches the fishtail slot, at some cost in draw resistance compared with an unfiltered bore of the same diameter.

Finish and grain are best judged from the photographs. What is established is the finish type itself: smooth, meaning the bowl was turned and sanded to show the wood's surface directly rather than blasted or rusticated to raise the grain. A smooth finish gives no cover - any fill or flaw in the block sits in plain sight, which is one reason briar chosen for a smooth bowl tends to be the cleaner, straighter-grained stock in a maker's pile.

Condition: unsmoked, with a bare chamber and no cake. The seller reports tiny dents and a faint dust odor, both consistent with long storage rather than use.

THE MEASUREMENTS
Length 148mm (5.9") - bowl height 50mm (2.0") - bowl width 44mm (1.8") - chamber depth 45mm (1.8") - chamber diameter 20mm (0.8") - weight 2.0 oz - 9mm filter

Ships from the Faridunhill / Pipe Collectors Encyclopedia archive. Worldwide shipping and professional sanitation on every estate pipe.
SKU: 067