Dunhill Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Ruby Bark Calabash with Silver (5) (4/25) (2024) (Unsmoked) Tobacco Pipe

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is arguably one of the most impactful English authors of the modern age, and is widely credited with popularizing crime fiction, especially the murder/mystery and detective subgenres. Born in 1859, Doyle wrote the first story to include the now-ubiquitous sleuth Sherlock Holmes in 1887 when he published A Study in Scarlet in a yearly periodical, a story that would be republished in 1888 as a full novel. Doyle published a number of other works featuring the detective, and Sherlock Holmes would go on to appear in four novels and 56 short stories that would become the author's most immediately recognizable works. Doyle died at 71 on July 7th, 1930, having created one of the most enduring characters in all fiction, with Holmes' routine pipe smoking making him one of pop culture's most iconic pipe smokers.

Though in the books Holmes mainly smoked straight pipes, the detective has become indelibly linked with the Calabash shape, as his portrayals on the silver screen by actors like William Gillette and Basil Rathbone featured the deeply bent shape. As such, for the 165th anniversary of Doyle's birth, Dunhill has created a limited-edition boxed set that includes a briar Calabash in Group 5 proportions. These pipes are possessed of ample sinuousness, with a deep bend through the shank and stem that poise these pieces for comfortable smoking. The transition is quite tight, and it gives way to a fairly slim, curling shank that's capped with a broad dome of sterling silver engraved with "A.C.D 1959 - 2024" and acts as a sturdy military mount for the sleekly tapering stem that arcs away out back. Up front, the bowl stands on a sweeping heel and grows tall, expressively flaring walls that reach up to a flat rim, holding a capacious chamber and remaining light enough for comfortable clenching. Dressed in the crisp sandblast of the Ruby Bark finish, this pipe is additionally serialized out of 25 total examples in the finish and comes in one of the marque's iconic leather-bound, book-style boxes.

Dunhill's Ruby Bark finish is one that's gone through a fairly extensive evolution since its inception in 1972. It began as the Redbark and has always remained a red-stained sandblast, but the color was brightened a few years after its introduction before Dunhill returned to the original, darker hue in 1976. Eventually, though, the Redbark was discontinued in 1987. After a hiatus of several decades, the same ruby-stained sandblast was reimagined in the form of today's Ruby Bark finish, adding to the rich aesthetic crisp accents of sterling silver for a colorful presentation that still retains a high level of formality.