Bo Nordh 2002 Smooth Ramses Estate Briar Pipe, Other Estates

Description

Bo Nordh was—and still is—one of the most important pipe makers to have ever lived. This may sound like hyperbole, but even a cursory survey of the shapes and styles pursued by pipe makers today will inevitably discover his ubiquitous influence, provided one knows what to look for. Even if one doesn’t, pipe makers themselves, especially in the global artisan community, are very open about just how much Bo Nordh means to them. This is not a new development, either; Nordh’s work has steered trends in pipe making for over half a century, with each new year bringing with it a fresh cohort of Nordh devotees. With all of this in mind, it should be no surprise that Bo Nordh’s pipes are among the most sought-after—if not the most sought after—in the world today.

Born in Sweden in 1941, Nordh did not initially intend to become a pipe maker. Instead, he trained as an engineer, but a motorcycle accident in his youth would, sadly, cut that ambition short. Confined to a wheelchair, Nordh struggled to find work in the field he had pursued. In the late 1960s, however, Nordh stumbled, by chance, upon the vocation that would define the rest of his life.

It all start—as is often the case with pipe makers—with a hobby kit. Nordh’s local tobacconist, Pip-Larsson, sold pre-drilled briar blocks for amateurs to try their hand with, much like specialty pipe supply shops do today. Using only hand tools, Nordh worked away at kit after kit, trying to shape the briar so as to navigate the multitude of flaws inherent to them. He became so frustrated and fixated with making a pipe that wasn’t laden with pits that he returned regularly to Pip-Larsson to buy more. Noticing Nordh’s frequent return visits and spending habits, the owner of the shop asked Nordh what he was doing. After finding out that Nordh was making pipes, the shop owner asked Nordh to bring them to him to look at them. When Nordh showed him, he was impressed, and recommended that Nordh stamp the pipes with his own name and sell them through the shop—and sell they did.

In search of better materials and pipe making know-how, Nordh traveled to Copenhagen to meet the pioneering post-war artisan Sixten Ivarsson, who immediately took a liking to him. Ivarsson helped Nordh acquire high-quality briar and the right equipment for the job, and imparted a little a little wisdom as regarded technique. This appears to have paid off in spades, as soon enough, Nordh had achieved much the same stature as Ivarsson, making pipes that were never without demand, and whose buyers were as far flung as Japan and the United States—two markets especially attuned to high-grade pipes.

This remained the case until Nordh’s last years, and even after he reached his sixties, Nordh’s work was marked by a near-unrivaled quality and—just as importantly—creativity. Among the many designs that pipe makers utilize today, a vast number of them have roots in pipes originally designed by Nordh. This includes staples of modern pipe making such as the Elephant’s Foot, the Nautilus, the Ballerina, the Sphinx, the “Bo Pot” (posthumously named after the pipe Nordh himself preferred to smoke), and a few other minor, but still quite regular—fixtures, such as the Sea Horse, the Half-Note, the Nut, and the “BoDog” (another posthumously named and revived shape based on a Rhodesian Nordh had tinkered with, but did not perfect during his own lifetime).

Bo Nordh passed away relatively young, around the age of just 65. Yet he managed to achieve more in thirty years’ worth of pipe making than most would in double that. And, even toward the end of his life, he was still creating novel designs that would shape artisan pipe making for decades after he was gone. The Ramses was one of the very last conceived by Nordh, though its firmly established presence within so many of today’s artisan movements can give a false impression as to just how recent it is. According to Nordh’s friend and Scandinavian pipe scholar Jan Andersson, the first Ramses was created in the Spring of 2002, four years before Nordh’s passing. It was not a quick and easy birth, one might say; Nordh had block of briar with beautiful, interesting patterning, but it took a while for him to decide which direction to take it in as a pipe. Nordh was in and out of hospital during this time, and when he finally did begin to realize his ideas for the block, he was not happy with it. Nordh kept at it, though, and eventually he arrived at what we now know as the “Ramses.”

As with a number of Nordh’s designs, the defining features of the Ramses when it comes to the briar itself concern its bird’s-eye and cross-grain patterns, as opposed to vertical grain. The pipe’s bowl sits in the middle of a single, broad, and quite shallow, flattened plane, almost as if the former is “emerging” from the latter. Because of the way Nordh typically cut the Ramses, the front of the bowl begins as a bulb of bird’s-eye, which slowly morphs into cross grain as it moves outward, before transforming once again at the bowl’s rear, which is pure bird’s-eye in its entirety. Needless to say, it is extremely difficult to achieve the intended aesthetic effect, and the pipe is also notoriously challenging from a technical perspective, with Nordh having devised a specialized means of drilling the draft hole so that it would sit at the base of the chamber and even pass a pipe cleaner (though with a little bit of twisting required).

The condition is great. Minor inner rim darkening and very slight handling marks, but overall very well looked after.

Details:

Length: 7″ / 177.8mm

Bowl Width: 0.84 / 21.33mm

Bowl Depth: 1.47″ / 37.33mm

Weight: 3.7oz / 106g