When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
A metal body built to hold a meerschaum bowl, not a briar one - that is the thing to notice about this pipe before you even get to the stamp.
The seller read the stamp himself: Brevete France &. Etranger, Model Depose, Made in France, JIMA - one continuous line running along the shank. No shape number accompanies it, no factory code, nothing further.
Brevete is French for patented, and Etranger extends that claim abroad as well as at home - the stamp tells you a patent exists somewhere behind this design. It does not say what the patent covers, and nothing else on the shank spells it out, so none is stated here. Model Depose is a separate mark, a registered design filed to stop a competitor copying the shape or the fitting, again without naming which detail was registered. Marks of this kind were routine on French pipes through the first half of the twentieth century, when metal-bodied and combination pipes were patented and registered at a steady pace across the trade. Neither mark dates this individual example on its own, and no date is asserted from them here.
The construction is worth more attention than the stamp. A metal body forms the shank and the outer wall of the bowl; set into it is a meerschaum insert, which is the true smoking chamber. Meerschaum is used in pipe making for one property above all others: it takes heat. Where a briar bowl manages heat by charring and building a cake over time, a meerschaum chamber absorbs it directly. Collectors prize meerschaum partly for how it changes with use, coloring from white or pale ivory toward amber and brown as oils pass through the stone - a slow transformation that a metal shell cannot show. The metal body here does a different job: it gives the pipe a rigid, durable shank and mount without the weight of an equivalent solid-briar pipe of the same size.
At 145mm overall this is a compact pipe, well under the 230mm mark that would call it a churchwarden. At 40 grams it carries the weight distribution of a metal-and-meerschaum build rather than solid briar. The chamber runs 20mm across and 33mm deep - a tall, narrow bore relative to its width, built for a slow and even burn rather than a wide, fast one. Bowl height of 40mm against a bowl width of 35mm gives a slightly taller-than-wide profile at the bowl itself. No shape name is stamped anywhere on the metal, and none is asserted here.
Finish and grain: see the photographs.
Condition: not yet graded - refer to the photographs; a detailed condition report is available on request.
THE MARKS
- JIMA, stamped on the shank
- BREVETE FRANCE & ETRANGER
- MODEL DEPOSE
- MADE IN FRANCE
THE MEASUREMENTS
Length 145mm (5.7\") - bowl height 40mm (1.6\") - bowl width 35mm (1.4\") - chamber diameter 20mm (0.8\") - chamber depth 33mm (1.3\") - weight 40g (1.4 oz)
Ships from the Faridunhill / Pipe Collectors Encyclopedia archive. Worldwide shipping and professional sanitation on every estate pipe.
SKU: 426
ABOUT 
