Stanwell 1950s Featherweight 7472 Sandblasted Potato Sack Estate Briar Pipe, Danish Estates

Description

Stanwell is one of Denmark’s most celebrated and enduring pipe companies, having been founded by Poul Nielsen shortly after the second world war. Over the last six decades, Stanwell has established itself as both a leader in innovative Danish design and for producing well-priced pipes with precision construction and engineering. Many of its designs were created for the company by iconic pipe-makers in the Scandinavian scene, such as Sixten Ivarsson, Anne Julie, Jess Chonowitsch, and Tom Eltang.

Stanwell’s Featherweight, or Featherweights, line has been in intermittent production since its very first decade as pipe company. These ultra-light smokers are, however, a rather peculiar subset of Stanwell pipes. For one, the Featherweights are among the few exceptions to the rule that Stanwell pipes between approximately 1948 and (depending on who you ask) either 1970 or 1980 were stamped with the make’s abbreviated trademark registration number (“969-48”). Second, Featherweights are the only Stanwell pipes bar one to have ever featured four-digit shape codes, with the sole non-Featherweight four-digit being the 1240 (at least, thus far). Third, early Featherweights and recent production Featherweights are quite different, despite sharing a name and some core features, though on the upside, this does make them quite easy to tell apart.

Let’s start with the basics. As the name implies, Stanwell’s Featherweights have historically been the most lightweight pipes produced by the company, with some early iterations purportedly (by Stanwell) being between just 12 and 18 grams. They have also always had some connection to contemporaneous non-Featherweight catalog shapes, though their shape numbers have always been distinct to their non-Featherweight counterparts. The most recent iteration of the Featherweights was a series of shapes, many of which were designed by Tom Eltang, each being more or less a scaled-down rendition of a shape designed previously. These are identifiable by the “FEATHERWEIGHT” nomenclature and their separate, three-digit shape numbers, and have included shapes 199-202, 239-246, and 304-305. The Featherweight 199, for example, is a smaller rendition of Tom Eltang’s earlier shape, the 190 hexagonal-shank billiard. These Featherweights appear to have been made from the 1990s to very recently, with some being made in Denmark and others being made (after 2009) in Italy.

Early Featherweights, on the other hand, had four-digit shape codes and were much looser in their relationship with established, non-Featherweight shapes, and produced with much less regularity. Like the early Bamboos, their shaping is in keeping with the “spirit” of standard shapes, with much more room for variation in design, both among themselves and in respect to their standard counterparts. This one, for example, is a variation on the “Potato Sack” shapes designed for Stanwell by Sixten Ivarsson, such as the 21 and the 96, though it is also shorter and absent of the curvature of those shapes, instead being more akin to a Pibe-Dan Shape Reformed in its “checkmark” profile.

As can be seen, the pipe does not include a trademark registration number. How can we date this pipe, then? How do we know it is indeed pre-1980? For one, we know that Featherweights were sold during the 1950s, as they briefly feature in a catalog from the latter half of that decade, complete with four-digit shape codes. Featherweights do not feature in any extant catalogs between the 1970s and around the turn of the millennium, after which they return with the new, three-digit shape codes. Another important aspect of this pipe is that it features Stanwell’s first stem logo (albeit faintly), an uncrowned “S.” The crowned “S” was not trademarked until around the end of the 1950s, with the uncrowned variant being standard in Stanwell’s infancy.

With all of this in mind, the Featherweights become quite fascinating as a subset of Stanwell pipes, as well as the bane of anyone trying to create a universal guide for identifying and/or dating Stanwells. It is almost a relief that the early Featherweights—like the early Bamboos—are so rare.

The condition is very good. Very slight finish fading and slightly over-buffed stem.

Details:

Length: 5.4″ / 137.1mm

Bowl Width: 0.74 / 18.79mm

Bowl Depth: 1.01″ / 25.65mm

Weight: 0.9oz / 28g