Sixten Ivarsson: A Journey Through Time

December 10, 2014 by Sykes Wilford in Makers and Artists

Perhaps five or six years ago, when Nanna Ivarsson first told me that she had piles and piles of Sixten Ivarsson's old drawings and correspondence, my heart skipped a beat. While my career has been entirely in the pipe and tobacco business, I'm educated as an historian and I'm the child of a professor and a university librarian. The very idea of such a trove a pipe history sitting in an attic somewhere set me aquiver. But, as it turned out after I interjected excitedly, she wasn't exactly sure where they were. While I wasn't exactly crestfallen — the prospect of having access to these documents was still dangling at some point in the future — I was certainly disappointed to not be able to get my hands on them right away.

Nanna, while recognizing at some level that these documents were important, was pretty cavalier about the whole thing. I was a bit surprised at first, but from her perspective, this is her grandfather, not the guy that forever changed pipe making. To her, he was a man that she loved, that helped to raise her and taught her to make pipes, not a central figure in pipe history. I sort of get it. Years ago, my grandmother tried to give me a whole giant stack of papers, hymnals, and other theological works from my (at that point, long deceased) grandfather's days as a minister in rural Tennessee in the 1950s and 1960s. I was appropriately reverent (and accepted them), but I don't think I've ever really looked at any of it. For Nanna, her grandfather's papers are no different: a rather boring curiosity of family history.

During the intervening years, discussion of the papers surfaced in our conversations and correspondence from time to time, but the papers themselves failed to resurface. Nanna also moved about four times. She's been settled in her new home for a couple of years now and when I saw her there a few months ago, she had a plastic grocery bag for me. Filled with slips of paper. These pipe history treasures were, literally, stuffed in a plastic bag. And they'd clearly been that way for years.

Sixten Ivarsson did more to create modern artisan, high grade pipes than any other man. Almost every high end artisanal pipe maker in Denmark, Sweden, Japan, the United States, and Russia can trace his aesthetics and engineering roots to Sixten's pioneering developments in the 1950s and 1960s. Many, if not most, were taught to make pipes by someone who was taught by Sixten. Most of the central tools in a high grade pipe maker's workshop today are the same tools as those Sixten used to make pipes in 1950. Using the sanding disk as the primary shaping tool, shaping first and drilling second, and employing bamboo rhizomes for bamboo shanks were all Sixten innovations, to name just three. But perhaps more importantly, Sixten saw pipes the way that Arne Jacobsen saw household goods or furniture: form should follow function, but these things could all, fundamentally, be utilitarian art.

We've been working our way through the first couple of hundred documents — correspondence and drawings mostly — over the past few weeks, scanning and cataloging each. We're not totally sure where the whole project will take us, but we are certain that there will be a series of blog posts discussing different documents over the next few weeks and months. For now, though, we'll let this just be a little taste of what's to come...

You may also enjoy:

Eltang Turns to a New Stain

Video: Interview with Lars Ivarsson

Pipes of Decades Past

Comments

• Tim Thorpe on December 18, 2014

  This is so amazing to see! I love the history behind Danish pipe makers etc! Thank you guys for sharing this. TimThorpepipes.com

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• Roberto Hdz. on December 18, 2014

  What a unique oportunity to look the life of a legend... Hope you´ll be sharing some of it to us soon... Greetings from Mexico!!!

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