English Estates: Charatan's Make Special Billiard (3) Tobacco Pipe

A lean Billiard from Charatan, this piece boasts a sleek, ovoid shank-and-stem combination that places most of the visual weight onto the bowl. The transition is wide, with plenty of room to drape a digit, and the shank pushes out of it to meet a tapering stem of black vulcanite. Up front, the bowl stands atop a firm heel and grows subtly rounded walls that rise to a chamfered rim, offering enough rounding for a comfortable feel in hand and plenty of space to showcase the stummel's warm stain.

Charatan boasts a long, well-respected history of pipe making, with Frederick Charatan founding the business in 1863. One of the first pipe makers in England, Charatan began by producing meerschaum pipes, finding great success and quickly needing to relocate to a larger workshop, and it was here that Charatan began to carve briar pipes. Charatan has the rare distinction of being the first marque in England to hand-make their briar pipes from start to finish, starting with a raw block of burl and a vulcanite blank, coining the process with the now-iconic stamping of "Charatan's Make." Charatan was so successful that, before Dunhill began to make their own briars, Charatan actually supplied the legendary marque with pipes from 1908 to 1910. In 1962, then leader Reuben Charatan passed away, and the rights to the Charatan brand were sold in the next few years to Lane, who was the primary distributor for their pipes. Charatan then changed hands several more times in the following years, before being bought by Dunhill in 2002.