Ropp: Ruby Sandblasted Liverpool Tobacco Pipe

The Liverpool is a Billiard variant, like the Lumberman, Lovat, and Canadian. Most closely related to the Lovat, the difference is merely in a tapered stem rather than a saddle stem. As you can see, that little detail makes a difference, with a tapered stem visually seeming more a part of the stummel and continuing the lines of the shank, whereas a saddle bit will truncate the extension and divert the eyes forward to the bowl. This piece from Ropp is a classic example, its arrow-straight shank-and-stem combination meeting the bowl with medium cheeking for a firm and traditional presentation.

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.