For Those Looking for Help Determining the Value of a Tobacco Pipe
What is a tobacco pipe worth? Are my smoking pipes valuable? Can I sell used pipes? These are questions that people have increasingly asked over the last few decades. Sometimes, these are questions asked because a pipe smoker wants to downsize their collection. Other times, someone might inherit pipes from a relative and wonder what should be done with them. The simple answer is that tobacco pipes, used or unused, can be valuable, with prices ranging from $20 to $20,000 for a single pipe.
At MBSD Pipes, a key part of our job is working out what the value of a tobacco pipe is and pricing it in line with that evaluation. That’s because a large part of our inventory is second-hand pipes, commonly called estate pipes. Unlike new pipes, estate pipes don’t come with a price set by the manufacturer, which means that we have to do the work of finding out a reasonable price for them.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you have pipes that you want to sell, in which case you’re in luck, as we buy tobacco pipes to sell at our shop. But you’re also probably wondering how we find out what those pipes are worth, so that we can buy and sell them for reasonable prices.
While it can be quite complicated to work out the value of an estate pipe, even for professional pipe sellers like us, we wanted to give our customers a good idea of the main things involved in that process. Just about every estate pipe that comes through our shop is unique in some way, but there are some general rules that apply in finding its value:
Brands and makers
Every pipe is made by someone, whether it’s a large company or an individual artisan working solo. The brand names of these companies and individuals are very important for finding out what a pipe is worth. Some brands are very expensive, and others are deliberately made to be very affordable. Some brands are widely known across the world, and others are known by a much smaller number of people. Even if the company who made a pipe went out of business decades ago, or if the person who made a pipe has long since passed away, their brand recognition has a very important influence on what buyers will be willing to purchase one of their pipes for.
The brand of a pipe is usually stamped somewhere on the bowl, or is at least indicated by a logo on the mouthpiece. Sometimes, however, brands and logos can be worn off a pipe over time, or become hard to read without a magnifying glass.
Lines and grades
Some pipe makers price their pipes based on their own in-house quality assessment, which is most typically represented by the line a pipe belongs to, or the grade it has been given. For example, a pipe maker might divide their pipes between a line for light brown, smooth finished pipes, and another line for much darker, smooth finished pipes, or for sandblasted or rusticated pipes. Similarly, a pipe maker might divide their pipes between what they see as the highest-grade examples of their work (often based on the quality of the grain patterns of the briar wood used) and the lowest.
When selling these pipes as new, pipe makers price their pipes according to the lines and/or grades they belong to, which is usually stamped on the pipe. These lines and grades are additional signals for the value of a pipe when it is sold second-hand.
It should be noted, however, that lines and grades are inseparable from brand recognition when selling these pipes when new and when second-hand, meaning the highest-quality pipe from one brand still might be worth less than a lower-quality pipe from another brand.
Lines and grades are usually stamped on the bowl of a pipe, making it easier to find out how the manufacturer classified it. Pipe manufacturers will often use different formats to separate their lines and grades, which may require research on resources like Pipedia.org or Pipephil.eu to accurately identify. One pipe maker, for example, might grade their pipes from “A” to “E,” with “E” being the highest grade, whereas another might grade their pipes from “E” to “A,” with “A” being the highest. Each pipe maker has to be treated individually to understand what a particular pipe is in relation to their catalogs and quality determinations.
The age of a pipe
If a pipe is well made and well looked after, it can last a very long time, both as a collector’s piece and as something to smoke tobacco with. A pipe that is very old can be significantly more valuable than a pipe made a few years ago, even if both pipes were made by the same company.
But be mindful that a pipe being old doesn’t necessarily mean it is very valuable. Age is something that is also closely connected to brand recognition when it comes to a pipe’s value, so a 50- or 100-year-old pipe from a well-known and/or well-respected brand is typically more valuable than a 50- or 100-year-old pipe from a brand that not many people know about.
Remember, pipe smoking used to be a lot more popular in the past, with countless numbers of brands competing to sell their own pipes. A much smaller number of brands are still remembered and respected today, with pipes from these brands carrying more value than brands that are largely forgotten.
The accurate dating of a pipe can also be complicated, though many pipes can be pinned down to a rough timeframe based on the style of the pipes and what’s stamped on them. Each brand is different, however, so familiarizing yourself with the specific indicators of age for each is essential.
Condition
Condition is one of the most straightforward indicators of the value of a pipe. If you take two pipes made in the same year, from the same brand and of the same grade, the one that is in better condition than the other will be more valuable (especially if it has never been smoked). Some things that can contribute to a diminished condition include:
- Bowls with darkened or charred rims, caused during the lighting of a pipe
- Bowls with scratched exteriors, caused by accidentally knocking the pipe against hard surfaces
- Bowls with burned interiors, caused by smoking the pipe hotter than is typical
- Bowls with caked interiors, caused by a lack of cleaning of the pipe
- Bowls with worn stampings, caused by repeated over-polishing of the pipe during cleaning.
- Oxidized (yellowed) mouthpieces, caused by overexposure to heat and light
- Chewed up or scratched mouthpieces, caused by the pipe being held tightly in the smoker’s mouth
Many of the things that contribute to the diminished condition of a pipe can be lessened by repair and restoration, which is best done by a professional in the pipe industry. Just because a pipe has seen a lot of use, that doesn’t mean that it can’t still be valuable. When pipes in poor condition are sent to us at MBSD Pipes, for example, we make an assessment as to whether the pipe would be fit for sale if it was refurbished by our partners in the pipe repair profession. We make this assessment based on whether we think the pipe can be successfully refurbished to a state that a buyer would be happy with, and based on other attributes of the pipe, such as its brand, which factor into its value once refurbished. If we think the pipe is still valuable, we offer to purchase it, with the costs of refurbishment subtracted.
Rarity
Rarity, like age, can significantly contribute to the value of a pipe, and the two are often closely connected. After all, the older something is, the less chance there is is that it’s survived intact.
Over the last few centuries, lots of pipes have been manufactured. Most of these pipes have been mass-produced, meaning certain pipes are very easy to come by, even today, as thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, will have been made at one point in time. But some kinds of pipes are much rarer than others. Some pipe makers produce limited edition pipes for one reason or another, which are much less common than their standard edition counterparts. High-grade pipes can be similarly rare, as it takes exceptionally good briar wood to make them, which is less common and expensive to acquire. Pipes made by artisans are typically rarer than pipes made in factories, as it’s just one or two people making them, in contrast to the dozens or hundreds of workers who belong to a pipe company.
But rarity, as with lines & grades, and as with age, does not automatically mean high value. Instead, it has to be considered alongside all of these other things. A limited-edition pipe from one brand will be far more valuable than from another if the first brand is more well known and well regarded. A pipe from an artisan who made fewer than 500 pipes in their entire career might still be less valuable than a pipe from a company that made hundreds of thousands of pipes while it was operational.
Demand
Demand is the hardest thing to determine about pipes. Once a pipe is made, its brand, line, and grade will not change. The pipe’s age will only ever increase, and its condition will only deteriorate based on how it is handled and stored. But demand changes all the time, with “crazes” for certain pipes coming and going, and other pipes being forgotten (leading to decreased demand) or rediscovered (leading to increases) by the pipe smoking and collecting community. At MBSD Pipes, we monitor demand based on our own sales and on the sales of other pipe shops across the industry.
If you’re interested in assessing demand for yourself, a good place to start is by following different pipe shops and watching their inventory. How much a shop prices a particular pipe for shows what that shop expects demand for the pipe to look like. But this is only the first part of assessing demand. The second part is seeing whether a pipe priced at a certain amount by a certain shop sells. If it doesn’t sell for a long period of time, that assessment of demand was mistaken. This is perfectly normal and usually just means that the pipe was slightly overpriced, or that demand was lower than expected. Nobody is all-knowing and nobody can predict the future, including professionals in the pipe industry. But if you pay close attention to the pipe market as a whole, you’ll have a higher chance of knowing what people want and don’t want, as well as what they’d be willing to pay for what they do want.
Hopefully this explainer has given you a sense of what to consider in determining a pipe’s value, as well as what we at MBSD Pipes look for when we evaluate pipes sent to us.
If you have a pipe or collection of pipes you’d like to sell, MBSD Pipes has a system in place to evaluate your pipes and make you fair offer.
You can reach us at Mi******@*******es.com
