Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 3: Trickery of another kind is revealed in a scene in Chapman's play "A Humorous Day's Mirth," 1599. A customer at an ordinary says: "Hark you, my host, have you a pipe of good tobacco?" "The best in the town," says mine host, after the manner of his class. "Boy, dry a leaf." Quietly the boy tells him, "There's none in the house, sir," to which the worthy host replies sotto voce, "Dry a dock leaf." But the diner's potations must have been powerful if they had left him unable to distinguish between the taste of tobacco and that of dried dock-leaf.
From 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."
|