Silver Gray: Sandblasted Eskimo Egg with Mammoth and NAP Stem Tobacco Pipe

Silver Gray's signature Eskimo Egg design combines the gentle, soft curves of an Egg's bowl with the crisp, geometry of a Bulldog's diamond shank, juxtaposing hard and soft lines against one another across the stummel. This particular rendition is more sinuous than others we've received from Silver: In earlier renditions, the shank angles from the transition into the stem's downturn, but here the shank actually exhibits an upward curvature before transitioning into the stem's recurve. Such a design aspect is both impressive and stylistically appealing, requiring expert craftsmanship to preserve the shank's facets through such a curve, and the overall profile becoming much more fluid and gestural. That S-curve, then, flows through the heel before wrapping dramatically up the bowl's fore to exaggerate its plumpness and dynamism, the bowl seemingly pitched backward in the same way that a sports car's sudden acceleration presses its occupants against their chair backs.

In line with the accent-stem theme for our 7th annual American Pipe Making Exposition, Silver fashioned a very special mouthpiece to accompany this Eskimo Egg. The brindled vulcanite's color palette is one of taupe, sand, and subtle caramel, and it's matched by bands around the shank end of the same vulcanite sandwiching a pale accent of mammoth. Striking hues aside, however, the truly unique nature of this stem is at the button, which was modeled after Peterson's curious NAP stem.

One of Charles Peterson's most iconic patents was for the P-Lip design in 1898, still used today across Peterson's portfolio, but what many don't know is that he also patented another mouthpiece design six years later: the NAP stem, which appeared in Peterson's 1906 catalog only to fade into obscurity and eventual discontinuance in 1928. An almost forgotten innovation, the NAP stem featured a unique button that distributes smoke across the palate via five individual slots from the airway and a "clamshell" design with vents at each side and a horizontal gap at the front. Such engineering won't allow the stem to pass a pipe cleaner, but the idea behind the NAP stem is that, unlike the P-Lip which orients smoke upward across the roof of the mouth, smoke is distributed evenly across the palate. Silver has been fashioning NAP stems by hand since 2019, revitalizing the design, and detailed accounts of her process and of the results can be find at Mark Irwin's renowned Peterson Pipe Notes blog. Cutting such a stem requires time-consuming process and much hands-on work, and it's inclusion on this Eskimo Egg is an excellent and impressive addition to this year's Expo, thoroughly unique among the selection.