Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

"Old English 'clays,'" says Mr. T.P. Cooper, "are exceedingly interesting, as most of them are branded with the maker's initials. Monograms and designs were stamped or moulded upon the bowls and on the stems, but more generally upon the spur or flat heel of the pipe. Many pipes display on the heels various forms of lines, hatched and milled, which were perhaps the earliest marks of identification adopted by the pipe-makers. In a careful examination of the monograms we are able to identify the makers of certain pipes found in quantities at various places, by reference to the freeman and burgess rolls and parish registers. During the latter half of the seventeenth century English pipes were presented by colonists in America to the Indians; they subsequently became valuable as objects of barter or part purchase value in exchange for land. In 1677 one hundred and twenty pipes and one hundred Jew's harps were given for a strip of country near Timber Creek, in New Jersey. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, purchased a tract of land, and 300 pipes were included in the articles given in the exchange."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

An amusing example of the bragging "tobacconist" is pictured for us in Ben Jonson's "Bobadil." Bobadil may perhaps be somewhat of an exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from his pocket, declares that it is all that is left of seven pounds which he had bought only "yesterday was seven-night." A consumption of seven pounds of tobacco in eight days is a pretty "tall order"! Then he goes on to brag of its quality—your right Trinidado—and to assert that he had been in the Indies, where the herb grows, and where he himself and a dozen other gentlemen had for the space of one-and-twenty weeks known no other nutriment than the fume of tobacco. This again was tolerably "steep" even for this Falstaff-like braggart. He continues with more bombast in praise of the medicinal virtues of the herb—virtues which were then very firmly and widely believed in—and is replied to by Cob, the anti-tobacconist, who, with equal exaggeration on the other side, denounces tobacco, and declares that four people had died in one house from the use of it in the preceding week, and that one had "voided a bushel of soot"!

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