Vintage Dun-Rite Walnut 8-Pipe Stand, Duraglas Jar, c. 1940–1955

The Piece

A two-tier walnut pipe stand with its original amber glass tobacco jar standing through the middle of it. The lower board is a solid slab with eight shallow scooped rests routed into it, one for each pipe bowl. The upper board sits above on four turned spindle columns and carries eight round holes for the stems, so a pipe drops through the top and settles into its scoop below, standing upright the way pipes are meant to be rested.

The jar is the centrepiece and it does the structural work too. Heavy amber pressed glass, ribbed in close vertical flutes all the way round, waisted in at the middle and flaring at the foot, so the whole thing reads like a small barrel. It passes through a cut opening in the upper board and is held by four brass acorn nuts set at the corners of that opening. Against the walnut the amber goes from deep treacle in shadow to bright honey wherever light gets behind it.

The wood is warm mid-brown with a soft sheen and clear straight grain, the edges chamfered, the columns turned with crisp rings at the collars.

History & Provenance

The base of the jar is where the information is, and there is a lot of it. Around the outer ring it reads DUN-RITE WOOD NOVELTY and BKLYN N. Y. Across the middle, in cursive script, is Duraglas, and beneath that sits a glassmaker's logo flanked by numerals.

Those marks come from two different companies and together they date the piece closely.

Dun-Rite Wood Novelty of Brooklyn made the rack. They were a working manufacturer of pipe stands and smoking accessories, and their name appears on the glass because they commissioned the jars to fit their own racks rather than buying a stock canister.

Duraglas is the other half. It is the trademark of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, introduced in 1940 and applied in that cursive script to an enormous range of containers. Anything carrying it was made in 1940 or later, full stop. The logo beneath it is Owens-Illinois's own maker's mark, the diamond and oval with an I at the centre, which the company adopted in 1929 and replaced on 1 March 1954 with a plain I inside an oval. The numerals either side are the plant code and the year code, and the figure below is the mould cavity number.

So the floor is 1940, set by the Duraglas trademark, and the practical ceiling is the mid 1950s, set by the diamond mark going out of use. It is offered as c. 1940 to 1955, and that range comes from two documented trademark periods rather than from style.

The object belongs to the high-water mark of American pipe smoking. A stand like this sat on a desk or a side table and held a man's working rotation where he could see it, with the day's tobacco in the jar beside it. Pipe smoking fell away steeply from the 1960s, which is why these turn up in estates far more often than they turn up in use, and why the walnut on most of them is still good.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Amber glass and walnut is one of those combinations that simply works, and this puts a good lump of both together in a compact footprint. It reads as a serious mid-century desk object whether or not anyone in the house smokes.

The jar takes anything small and loose, which is most of what clutters a desk. Paper clips, stamps, matches, loose change, guitar picks. The eight holes and scoops will hold pens, brushes, screwdrivers or chisels just as happily as pipes, and it looks purposeful doing it.