SON (Skovbo & Nording, 1950s-60s) Sandblasted Stack Estate Briar Pipe, Danish Estates

Description

While it is, as one might say, often only half remembered today, the SON make was of decisive importance in the emergence of “Danish” pipe making as we know it. The make created in the 1950s by Aage Skovbo and Erik Nording, with the name being an acronym for the two, i.e., Skovbo og Nording (“Skovbo and Nording”). Nording was a young man with a background in engineering, and Skovbo was a pipe maker, and it was a chance meeting that led to them making pipes together under a single banner, before this partnership soured and the two went their separate ways (which happens to be a surprisingly common turn of events in the history of the Danish greats). Skovbo went off to continue making Skovbo pipes and Nording kept on with the SON make into the 1960s, before ultimately dissolving the make entirely. Like Skovbo, Nording went on to create the Nording make, and with it a whole workshop that would, at various points in its lifetime, see Poul Ilsted, Svend Axel Celius, Jens Tao Nielsen, Peder Jeppesen, and Søren Erik Andersen among its employees.

The way I’ve always seen it is that SON pipes are not only distinctly Danish—they’re historical artifacts from a time when “Danish” had only just begun to mean something in the world of pipes. They’re “germinal,” if you like, full of all the things that would soon come to be known as a “Danish pipe.” This one, for example, gestures at the “Fancy” freehands that much of Erik Nording’s career would be associated with, but it also has a little of Pibe-Dan (later Pipe Dan) to it with its stacked, tulip proportions, and with it the pipes of Sven Knudsen, Gert Holbek, and even the more voluptuous Danish creations of the 1970s and 1980s. Is a SON as valuable as a Poul Rasmussen or a Sixten Ivarsson? Monetarily, it would seem not. But from the standpoint of significance? They’re certainly up there.

The condition is good. Some wear to the rim, stem slightly over-buffed, and some residual oxidation.

Details:

Length: 5.5 / 139.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.94 / 23.87mm

Bowl Depth: 2.33″ / 59.18mm

Weight: 1.7oz / 50g