Ropp: Ruby Sandblasted Author Tobacco Pipe

Catering to a popular style of early 20^th century pipe design, this Author from Ropp packs bold, muscular proportions into a rather compact overall form. While the Author is an inherently stout shape — marked by an extra-plump, Apple-like bowl and robust shank — the abbreviated length in this rendition does well to emphasize that robustness even further. Such cues make for a substantial, palm-filling briar that's still easily portable and well-balanced thanks to the angled transition and bent stem. Though a staple of the classic pipe chart, the Author is less-often seen than other such classics, and Ropp's version here fits the archetype wonderfully and aligns with the French marque's history of fashioning traditional shapes.

Ropp's Ruby line presents a more colorful palette than the French marque's other series, dressing each pipe in a crimson sandblast. Such a stain hearkens back to old-school French and English pipes, and the retro style is furthered by the inclusion of new old-stock stems of genuine horn — a mouthpiece material used extensively in the early 1900s. Though the horn stems also call to mind Ropp's Vintage, Vintage Stout, and Vintage Superior series, the Ruby prioritizes darker-hued horn for a deeper, warmer aesthetic that pairs handsomely with the scarlet stain of the stummel. Furthermore, unlike the Vintage lines, Ropp's Ruby offers both straight and bent shapes: While vulcanite and acrylic are relatively easy to bend, requiring only heat, horn is much more unruly, needing both heat and prolonged pressure to ensure the bent shape holds. To fashion the Ruby's bent pieces, then, Antoine Grenard, who runs the old Chapuis-Comoy factory in Saint-Claude, France, went so far as to use a vintage stem-bending machine from the Chapuis-Comoy pipe museum, thoroughly cementing the Ruby line's vintage appeal.