SON (Skovbo & Nording) Magnum Pot Estate Briar Pipe, Danish Estates

Description

if you’re not familiar with the SON name itself, if you know anything about Danish pipes, you’ll probably recognize one of the names that it was an acronym for. The brand was created as a partnership between Aage Skovbo and (in Danish, ‘og‘) Erik Nording, but Skovbo soon left, with Nording taking over as the sole creator of SON pipes. This went on for a few years before Nording dissolved SON to create a brand under his own name. As such, son pipes are not only distinctly Danish – they’re historical arteficts from a time when ‘Danish’ had only just begun to mean something in the world of pipes.

I find SON pipes to be fascinating. The Skovbo-Nording partnership has an interesting serendipity to it, but the fact that these are some of the earliest ‘Danish’ style pipes is even more intriguing, as they are the germs of so much of what came after. This SON, for example is not extraordinarily ‘Danish’ as we would understand today, being something of a simple pot; at the same time, the pipe’s drastically wide bowl, coupled with its squat and relatively short length, prefigure the wilder shapes of ‘Danish’ pipes and after. The pipe looks to be a grade ‘8,’ which I wish I could say more about, but so far I’ve only handled SON pipes that used a letter grading system, rather than numbers (A, B, C, etc.). However, as the letter grading system was an ascending one, it could be hypothesized that this was quite a high-end output for Jan and Erik. It certainly has excellent grain.

The condition is excellent. There’s one or two handling marks on the rim, but it doesn’t appear to have been smoked much at all – which is quite remarkable.

 

Details:

Length: 5.2″ / 132.0mm

Bowl Width: 1.10 / 27.94mm

Bowl Depth: 1.28″ / 32.51mm

Weight: 2.3oz / 66g