In this interview, James sat down with R. Bear Graves to discuss his time in and around the tobacco pipe industry.
How did you first get into pipes?
It started when I was five years old. I was living in a living in Alaska and my father’s best friend smoked a pipe, and I just thought that was so cool because my dad smoked cigarettes. It was cool to me, you know? I can’t say that I was. We used to get this thing called the Sears Catalog . And in the Sears Catalog , they used to sell pipes, or specifically their pipe called ‘The Pipe’ – yes, The Pipe. And they bragged it wasn’t made of water, no, but “space-age materials.”
A 1971 Sears catalog ad for ‘The Pipe’ and its sister make ‘The Smoke,’ preserved by the Internet Archive. The one that became the Venturi? [1]
Exactly. At the time, you could get them in red and blue and yellow. So, I’m a five-year-old, thinking, “I’m going to smoke things when I get older.” And that actually kind of stuck with me. I didn’t actually smoke until years later, aside from the occasional stolen corn cob from a small store – which, of course, I didn’t particularly like. But when I turned about 16, my father said, “Well you’re already smoking cigarettes, so if you want to smoke a pipe, give it a shot.” And I did. [My parents] really supported me in that regard. In fact, when I went into the military, a gift from my father was a Dunhill. Wow. My parents were not rich people, so it was like a big deal, like “shhh, don’t tell your mother” type of thing.
A new Dunhill?
Yeah, brand new. It was from a fairly middle-end tobacconist that was located in one of our shopping malls. It was a shell briar, a [group] 4. And that made me quite happy. It made me proud to own such a thing.
That’s quite surprising, as a lot of your work that I’ve read deals with more ‘Danish’ and more ‘modern’ styles of pipes. How did you get into that?
Well, there were about 5 or 6 pipe smokers in my battalion, and I noticed that one went out and bought this thing . It might have been a Preben Holm,[2] and I just like, “wow.” I’m used to things looking like a Dunhill billiard. I’m thinking, “What? Can you actually smoke that?” He said “yeah, they’re becoming really popular.” The other thing was, back then I was smoking an aromatic that was so sweet, it was like a claymore mine had gone off in a chocolate shop, and he was smoking a latakia blend. And I thought, ‘that smells terrible,’ but I warmed to it the more I was around it. Plus, he was like, “the English like this stuff,” and I thought, ‘oh, okay, that raises its worth by at least 75 percent, me being an anglophile. He said to me to think of it like the first smoke from a fire at the beginning of autumn, or like an Arabic incense. Looking back, he certainly did the Vulcan mind meld[3] with me on that one, and I started smoking latakias.
What year, roughly, was this?
This would be about 1976. Back then, a Preben Holm wound up running about 70 to 100 [US] dollars,[4] which for a troop that was not commissioned and, wasn’t a Lieutenant or a captain, or anything like that, was maybe half of my paycheck per month. So, at first the acquisitions were slow.
A ‘Hallmark’ H-4 grade pipe from Preben Holm’s workshop. Once I got out of the military, I had to go to college, and my first job was as an ‘assistant manager’ (read: I was the grunt) in a three-man shop of a very nice pipe store. It was that point I started to really look into getting familiar with these kinds of pipes – properly looking at them, holding them, and so on – and part of this meant getting information from buyers who really wanted that Savinelli Punto Oro[5] or, you know, a really nice looking GBD.
We also had a couple of very high-level collectors. We had one guy who had the number one collection of Dunhill ODA’s[6] in the United States. When he came visiting, he would bring suitcases of them so you could just look at them. He would say, “pick one up, smoke it, let me introduce you to Nightcap,”[7] that sort of thing. So, through osmosis I was getting a nice feel for how pipes work, and what seemed to sell. Essentially, that was where that was born. Pretty much all the way through my life, no matter what I’ve done, student, real estate development, even when I went to medical school, I always kept my hand in a local pipe shop, even if I only worked two hours a week – even if just for the employee discount!
How long did that go on for?
This was from the 1980s the way up until about 2004. Around about 2000, I’ve discovered alt.smokers.pipes .[8] I found it to be wonderful. Then I started doing things in the off-topic subgroup – you know, “does anybody here like fine single malts?” That and tea. I am actually a member of the American Tea Masters.[9] I would even do ‘your pipe haiku of the evening.’ That type of thing. Admittedly, it did piss off a lot of the old timers who only wanted to know what was in your pipe. But it also started getting huge responses and there a lot of humour and a lot of joking, and it started turning into a club that was about pipes, but much like in a clubhouse, you know, somebody would say, “did you see the game last night?” And it just kept expanding out.
From there. I started something called ‘pay it forward.’ Which is a program because there’s a lot of people who would say something like, “I’m really poor. Can you suggest something else I can smoke tobacco out of until I can afford my first real pipe?” Or even, “can you smoke hay [instead of tobacco]?” That type of thing. I was thinking that’s really sad. So, because, over at my shop we had a lot of people that would dump off bags of old estates.[10] Some of them you couldn’t do much with unless you were a professional. But I found I could buff it up, make it look nice, and send it off to the guy who couldn’t afford one, including some tobacco.
When I mentioned this to other guys in the group, they thought, “oh, I could do that too!” So, it became a thing. To make a long story a little shorter: in four years, we sent out over 3000 pipes. 3000 around the world, to every continent but Antarctica, and the recipient was expected to do nothing. If they felt like it, they could say thank you on the group. We did say that if you look at the actual postage of what we mailed to you and you have it within your means, please remit the postage, or later on do the same for somebody else. That was ‘pay it forward.’ It just kept going and going and eventually it wound up getting me like a pipe smoker of the year award – I think it was at the NASPC[11] show. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to accept it because one of the pipe makers I knew was having horrible back pain and was unable to move. So, I was off giving him medical treatment and didn’t collect the award in person. My wife likes to joke about that a lot.
Where did things go from there?
Well, actually, that was what I was doing when I got a call from Sykes at Smokingpipes.com.[12] We had known each other for a while because we both used the alt.smokers.pipes forum, and I first got together with him in 2001, when he was getting an inkling about doing pipe sales. Sykes started developing his business from what was essentially a small warehouse with his all of pipes shoved into here and there. And he said, “you really know pipes, and your writing is great. I find it as funny as hell. How would you like to grab some money and throw it in the business with me?” He said, “we’ll start setting up a real shop and one of two things will happen: either we’ll wind up filing for bankruptcy or we’ll have something really big going on.”
I said to my wife, Terri, “how about me doing this, and we get to live at the beach [in South Carolina]?” And she said, “okay.” As far as the hobby goes, it was the best decision of my life. As far as my finances go, it was the worst thing I’ve ever done [laughs]. Well, no. At the time, I was making six figures as in real estate as primary income, but as it’s real estate it was going to be better because I wouldn’t have to be worrying about how much I would make per month, I’d just have somebody pay me. Plus, I’d get to be around these pretty pipes and I get to tell people why they should love them like I do. That was damn attractive to me – that and living at Myrtle Beach. How can you beat that?
That sounds like a hard deal to pass up on. So, we’re at the early 2000s, right around the birth of pipes and tobacco ecommerce as we know it. What was it like working in that industry at that time?
Well, first of all, everybody said, “dude, you can’t do this.” This is the most belly-to-belly business in the industry. If it was a brick and mortar, you’d develop a personal relationship with the guys and their pipes, and you get to go around and pick them up and show them and that sort of thing. And afterwards you can have a bowl with him while he smokes his new pipe. There’s an atmosphere to that. That isn’t gonna happen on the Internet.
I can imagine. How did you get around that?
Sykes had an idea – what if we take each individual pipe – I mean each individual pipe we sell – and photograph that pipe different angles? Then we then put in measurements that are better than anyone could detect by just looking at it. Then then you have somebody describe that pipe – and don’t you dare just say, “this is a Peterson, a Killarney, you know, buy it [laughs ].” You find something positive to say about it, add something about [the islands of] Aran if you’re describing an Aran.[13] Or, just little pieces of trivia; you could say, “yes, this is machine made, but there’s a certain amount of hand finishing on these pipes,” or, “this one is a little bit longer than others I’ve seen today, and if you look on the left side, on the photograph, that’s really some remarkable grain,” or “that’s a surprising amount of bird’s-eye” – that type of thing. And then you would go on to the next one, then the next one.
From there, if somebody saw it, we had the best customer service. These guys were brilliant. They would spend an hour, if necessary, talking to somebody about that Savinelli Bing they’d seen, or whichever pipe. So, you are talking to a pipe expert, you have better measurements, you’ve got better views – certainly because you normally can’t spin a pipe around 360 degrees, etcetera, and if you didn’t like it, if it just wasn’t your style, we would send a return mailing label by fax, or email, or whatever. There’d be no charge to them, no restocking fee – you get the idea. If it was a bigger customer and they wanted to see that one Teddy Knudsen,[14] that one Tokutomi,[15] and an S. Bang,[16] we would send all three to them, and they had a credit card on file with us. They might say, “look, I’m only keeping the Tokutomi,” you said, “that’s fine, here’s how to send the others back to us.” It’s not often you can just walk into a tobacco store and pick up however many pipes and then return half of them [laughs ], with no muss, no fuss and another great contact with a customer service person that remembers your name.
Apparently something worked, because we went from a point when, basically, almost nobody was doing this on the Internet other than pipe companies who could send you a shape chart so you could pick one out that way. But nothing like the pipe shop experience at home. We really got rolling – I mean really got rolling – around 2005, and it was a lot of touch and go, but we kept growing and growing and we became one of the largest pipe ‘e-tailers’ in the world in a matter of three years. And then from there. We were almost bigger than everybody put together. It was a juggernaut. It would just keep rolling and rolling. And I mean, yeah, there’s some very, very nice stores in Europe but in terms of inventory, they might have 1200 pipes – which is very respectable – but then we would have some 8000 of them. So, we were able to move into a 40,000 square foot warehouse with shipping and receiving, and we have the local economy paying us money because we’re such a big employer in the area. They [the state] would give us a quarter of a million dollars to stay in that spot, which doesn’t happen with your average brick and mortar.
Were there any other problems you encountered specifically to do with the Internet and technology at the time?
Well, we had to go through the pain of search engine optimization, and then realized that Google had changed everything so much. After Hummingbird came out you couldn’t just pound-sign [#] ‘Radice’ for 18 lines to get people to your website.[17] We found on what works on that matter, and what was just a waste of intellectual energy.
One thing that didn’t hurt was our associations with Pipedia through Scott Thile.[18] I actually got in with him because he was one of my interviewees. Scott [Thile] was something like a three-evening interview, two hours at a time. We talked about everything, including his world-famous son.
Yes, I’ve read quite a few of your interviews. Would you be able to say a few things about that? How did you approach them, regarding, for example, which questions to ask or what tone to adopt?
Well, for pretty much most of them [the interviewees], right off the bat – kinda like in Playboy – there would be the ‘10 questions that everybody has to answer,’ that type of thing.[19] ‘When did you get into it?’ ‘What did you want to be when you grew up?’ Just getting the biographical information out of the way – married, kids, etcetera – then you could ask, ‘What attracted you to making pipes?’ ‘How did you feel about the first pipes you made? Were you encouraged or discouraged by them?’ And then it was very free floating beyond that. If there was a specific shape, or something they did differently, you could bring that up. Maybe you’d think you’d noticed something about the pipes, so you could ask them, ‘am I right about that?’ It was that type of thing, and they would then go ahead and elaborate. It was pretty close to what you’d get if you just sat down for a couple of hours and smoked a pipe with someone. But then, of course, you’d still end up redacting all the crap that wasn’t going to fit in [laughs ].
Bear in full ‘commissar mode,’ wearing a sable ushanka gifted by Dr Kovalev. As I started interviewing more people, from Micah Cryder[20] to Roman Kovalev[21] – who, by the way, is one of the most fascinating people on the planet , so I had something like a three- or four-part interview with him – once I had that down, I’d say, ‘Scott, I see you don’t really have anything on Kovalev [on Pipedia], would you like me to fill in some data?’ And, because we would be introducing two to three new carvers a month, all of that started becoming entries in Pipedia. For example, though it’s since been replaced, at one time, there wasn’t as much about Castello[22] on there as you might think – like the association with Wally Frank[23] when they were trying to move into the New York market, their fight,[24] and all that – so that was something we did a ton of research and back-and-forth on. At one time I had about a billion entries.
On the subject of new carvers, how did you find new brands or makers to introduce to your customers?
Often it would be a case where someone would say, “hey, there’s this kid over here, and somebody showed me one of his pipes and I think you might want to talk to him.” If it was a younger, or newer, pipe-maker – somebody with a pretty limited production – it might take them a month, or two months, to be able to create one – would be thrilled to death to just get the exposure. Plus, it’s the difference between going from pipe show to pipe show, spending $1000 to get there and maybe not selling anything, and mailing the pipes to one company and getting paid immediately . Which allowed them to buy more briar, and more equipment, and keep expanding.
So, maybe 30% of the time it would be a “hey I’ve got a buddy” sort of thing. The other, it would be hearing somehow about a person and contacting them, asking them if they’d be interested in wholesaling their pipes to us, as long as we could elevate their retail price. Obviously, it’s a bit of a gamble for them, as you’ve got to pay a middle man and you’re going to be taking less than if someone walked into your shop and bought it. But that’s the trade-off. And, if somebody wound up becoming popular, he could turn around and say, “you know this 50-50 arrangement we have? I’d like to see 65%.” And we’d have to say, “[sighs ], what about 60?” [laughs ]
Sounds bittersweet.
Yeah.
Speaking of pipe shows, and as you know, while we’re talking now, the Chicago Pipe Show will be winding down (Mitchell and Sarah from MBSD are still there, last I heard). I think it would be very interesting for readers to hear about what it’s like to go to a pipe show as an industry representative. I’m sure many readers will have been to one, and some will have been there to sell their own pipes, but I wondered what it was like for someone in your profession to attend.
Yep, I have done that many, many times. First of all, before you do it the first time, it’s like ‘ohh, I get to go to Chicago!’ And then, at the end of it, it’s like ‘ohh crap, why did I go to Chicago?’ But only because the amount of work is crazy. You’re having to get dozens, maybe hundreds, of pipes, transported – get them loaded up, get them to the resort, establish where your table is going to be. So far, no big deal. But now you’ve got to haul all these pipes down, you’ve got to set them up beautifully, you’ve got to create – hopefully- something other than just a folding bench. Then set up your company logo, get a certain amount of chairs for you and for customers to sit. Oh, and what do customers like? Espresso. Everybody likes espresso. So, we’re going to set up an espresso machine. [laughs ]
And it’s just constantly going. And people aren’t there to talk cricket. Sure, they want to talk, but they want to pick up and handle each one and say, “so if this one makes it to Sunday, would you consider a little bit of a discount?”
On the other hand, we would often go in a team of eight, with three people manning the table. So, the others would filter over to the bar and do a lot of ‘let me buy you a drink.’ or ‘Hey, Teddy, what’s going on?’ type of thing – more meet and greet. And there you don’t want to be talking about your pipes. What you want is you want the guy to like you. And it’s very much the same with the pipe makers too. The good ones understand that. Kurt Balleby is a perfect example. I was shining up one of my first Balleby pipes at my store and I didn’t have my finger in it properly. The thing flew across the room, hit the wall, put a big dent in it. So, I went to Chicago and when I went to Chicago, I showed it to Kurt and he goes, “ohh my friend, this is nothing, trust me. Let me have it for a few days. I’ll send it back to you and this will be totally gone.” I bought my next six high-grades from Kurt Balleby! Because I really, really like the guy.
We also used to get people together. Sometimes we would fly them in [to North Carolina], and we would be sitting around drinking Lagavulin[25] with the likes of Teddy Knudsen, Tom Eltang, Tokutomi, Peter Heeschen, and so on at our place. Then we would all board a Spirit airline or whatever and head to Chicago. And no, they weren’t going to sit on our table, but they would certainly make their presence heavily known around our table and every dinner we would take them out to a great dinner with pretty much no limit on what was spent on the food or wine – again, cementing that relationship. Whereas Teddy might make, say, eight pipes in a month – of which he was only going to retail four or five – if he only had three left, he would give us at least two, because there’s a little bit of implied obligation there.
One thing I wanted to come back to – and, in a way, this comes back to the forums, ecommerce, interviews, and documentary writing like Pipedia – is, broadly, the language, or the practice, of ‘talking about pipes.’ I was reading your conversation with Gary Schrier, the historian of the calabash, [26] and what struck me was the amount of experience and research that goes into being able to talk fluently and authoritatively about pipes like that. And, also, how important that might be when you’re trying to sell those pipes. How did you learn the ‘right’ way to talk about those pipes? Or, even, what to call many of them?
It depends on the pipe. Tom Eltang is an example. Let’s see, the ‘Eskimo.’[27] We didn’t come up with that, he did. Or his ‘Saturn’[28] pipe that you might have seen, with the ball of the planet and then a ring around the outside of it representing the rings of the planet – all of those came with the name. Plus, at the time, everybody had a grading system, where you’d have a Tom Eltang ‘Saturn’ [grade], which is fourth from the top, and so on. When Tokutomi, on the other hand, sent us something he would never give it a name. It was up to us to say, “that’s a really cool squat tomato ,” or, “this is a blowfish , but different from the Danes’.” For that reason, we would start calling them things like ‘Toku Fish.’ And you would work in the grades, like the ‘Hiro’[29] and that automatically would mean slapping on another 30% in terms of what you could charge. Teddy Knudsen’s [shapes] often did have a name, or at least he’d been around long enough that somebody would say, “this is a Teddy such and such, and it’s an ‘Eagle’ grade. Nielsen – ‘Former’ Nielsen[30] – not so much. He just makes the pipe and if you think it’s a three-quarter-bent Dublin, then go for it. Because it’s not the title that you give to the shape that’s gonna sell it; it’s the exacting standards as far as the engineering goes, the grain, etcetera.
But still, as you can imagine, as describing these pipes – especially as they start getting a little more dear to the pocket – you do have to wax eloquent on it if you’re gonna get a person to spend $400 or more on it. Funnily enough, Former came up to me at a show once, and he said, “[Bear puts on his best Danish accent ] Ohh! Bear! I read your stuff all the time. I had never miss it.” and I said, “what do you think?” He goes, “Bah, not so good.” And I’m like, “why is that?” He goes, “because everything you described is so magnificent and so wonderful and so perfect.” I said, “but I also say that about your pipes,” and he goes, “yes. But in my case, you’re accurate.” [Laughter ]
With Tokutomi, at that point, he didn’t exist in the US except for us, and we pretty much bought up all of his production. But, at the same time, when you get things that start looking a little different than the very early Tokus, the question is, ‘why?’ So, I would talk about [psychological] studies, where they would have participants come in and they would look at dots on a painting and say which ones they found most attractive. And that were inevitably the most attractive were the ones with the greatest amount of symmetry.[31] If there were a couple of dots in oddball places, or no golden ratio,[32] and so on, you wouldn’t get that positive reaction. But if you’re looking for that, about the last place you’re going to find it is in the best Japanese pipe-makers. Because their aesthetic comes from the ‘perfect within the imperfect’; grab any flower, and there’s going to be nothing perfectly symmetrical about it, but it’s going to be incredibly beautiful. Also, the sense of impermanence, of decay, and how do you work decay into a pipe? So, maybe there isn’t any symmetry, maybe there’s some fall-off, or jags of plateau that hang off of it. It’s a celebration of the Japanese aesthetic. Look at a zen garden: it isn’t the gardens of Versailles.[33] Everything is asymmetrical, and yet, if you stare at it with a soft eye, other things appear. And that started catching on, especially with [customers who were] art professors, or nipophiles,[34] who already have a little bit of that appreciation going on. That was how Tokutomi started growing and growing.
I always wondered how best to characterize the difference between European and Japanese pipe-makers – if there was such a thing.
Yeah, in fact, when I first sent a picture, even my co-workers were giggling, but I said, “no, it’s wabi-sabi , it’s the perfect within the imperfect – Google it, you idiots!” [Laughs ] But, seriously, this was at a point where part of his [Tokutomi’s] pipes were moving into a dimension that you could only sense, not see; the use of space/non-space, the trailing off. And when he made a blowfish-cavalier, he made a blowfish-cavalier . When I was writing it up, I looked at Sykes, and said, “this is going on for 2700 characters.” And he goes, “perfect.” I said, “really?” He said, “if somebody’s looking for a Peterson, they’re just going to look at that their eyes are going to glaze and they’re going to click the ‘next’ button, but the guy that’s going to buy that – yeah, that’ll work.”
Yeah, I can see that. You know, what strikes me now is that, on the one hand, the way you describe it seems very down to earth – straight to the brass tacks – but then just now, with the example of Japanese pipes, it starts sounding more like art history or philosophical aesthetics. It’s an interesting gear shift. I also meant to ask, do you have a background in fine art, or something like that?
I don’t really have a lot of formal arts training. I do have eight years of college, but I was about the furthest thing from a humanities guy, which – by the way – remains one of my big regrets in life. As an aside, when we started this thing, we felt that we had to find people that just knew pipes, pipes , pipes , and then they would copy the style of me, or whoever else was doing the writing. And we found out that that really wasn’t the way to go. What we needed was just somebody who had a good humanities background, someone that had finished college, for example. From there, we would teach them pipes. Because it’s not like they don’t have the resources right there with every click of the button – some 60,000 entries. But we didn’t know that at first. We thought we had to have somebody that just really understood pipes and could write. That’s how it felt to me. But eventually there was a point where that just wasn’t the case any longer.
With me, I had a very, very strong background in Asian art appreciation, focused on Japan, and so I brought that in. And then I loved the Toku pipes, that came naturally. Now, when it comes to the Danes, Sykes was my mentor. There’s no question about it. He had explained to me, you know, Sixten [Ivarsson], back with briar scarcity, and the fact that everybody had to pay $5 billion per smoke because of tobacco taxes, that’s why smaller pipes were prized. And about how he [Sixten] had to kind of make do with what he had, but instead of just slapping a bowl and a stick together, he says, “how can I do this and make it interesting?” Because, even though there is a great deal of symmetry in the earlier Danish pipes, there’s also a good bit of nature there too – their acorns, for example – the things that set it apart. You knew you were not looking at a Dunhill when you, when you were looking at a Sixten.
Top: Sixten Ivarsson for W.Ø. Larsen; bottom: Stanwell shape ’30’ (Brazilia model), designed by Ivarsson. Then he [Sykes] would start showing me the parentage: “OK, Sixten taught this guy who, if you look at his earlier pipes, you’ll see they’re pretty similar, but from there he started adding more flared bases, or he would start going more into the quasi-classical shapes. Or, they’d think, “why don’t we just take this and flatten it out and it becomes a surfer?” And from there and from there, once they kind of had the base shape, it was like, “what can we do to make it a little more interesting still? Well, OK. It’s a blowfish. What does a blowfish look like before it strikes?” You can look at the composition, and there it is, right now, frozen in time at the split second before stored energy becomes kinetic energy. Look at that curl, look at that arc – doesn’t this thing just look like it’s ready to go? What started out as a question of how to maximize bird’s-eye on the side and cross cut on the front, etcetera, became what could be done with the arc of the way that the shank interacts with the bowl and then even on to then even onto the bit. There is a real implied energy. And then you’d have certain makers that really lend themselves to implied speed; low slung shapes, longer, pinched stems that almost look aerodynamically designed. It’s getting harder perhaps, because when you sit at your desk and think, ‘OK, aside from the fact it’s a pipe, what the hell does this remind me of?’ Sure, you can say, “this thing’s got so much bird’s eye, it would frighten Tippi Hedren!”[35] Which, yes, I did, but there was more to it, even if it wasn’t anything formally taught. It was more like learning the Bible: And so-and-so begat so-and-so, who begat so and so.
See that’s another interesting thing, and something that goes back to the Toku and the Former pipes especially. There seems to be a lot going on implicitly in the making of how pipes are understood. It seems more like an ongoing conversation than anything else As with any conversation, there are some speakers who hold greater authority than others, but, also as with a conversation, there are always degrees of ‘interpretation’ that are constantly taking place. Or am I off the mark here?
It’s very, very much conversational. Take Kurt Balleby[36] – are you familiar with the work of Kurt Balleby?
Yes. I love it.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces . Source: Wikimedia Commons. Right. Well – and don’t think I’m taking too much credit here – I loved his brandies. And with his brandies, and his eggs, the one thing I loved was that he would reduce the bottom of the shank so the under-travel would cause the bowl to visually pudge out a little bit. It’s now like putting an egg on a cup, or on a flat or curved plane. I would start talking about how that really enhanced the bowl’s spherical qualities. And, as I started doing that – I don’t know if it was a coincidence or whatever – but I noticed that Kurt started making greater use of that under-travel. That’s the thing I look at. Because I love brandies, I love eggs, I love apples, and things like that, and if I notice that someone is emphasizing the aspects that I really like about a pipe, I’m going to point that out. I’m going to say – and maybe Freud would have a field day with this – “would you look at how voluptuous this bowl is?” Or I might refer to it as ‘Rubenesque.’[37]
I suppose I can see why you found a humanities background, or at least an interest in the humanities, to be beneficial in that industry. It sounds like there’s a lot of opportunities for transposing the language or concepts of cultural studies or art criticism, for example, into the field of pipes.
Very, very, very much so. Like I said, to me, I found I could work in something like that and then they [readers] could always Google, say, the paintings of Reuben. Or, let’s say, Picasso; some have a lot of Picasso in them, especially with the newer American pipe-makers. If you look at Todd Johnson, he wound up creating a lot of imaginative stuff and he’s got a master’s from Yale.[38]
I mean, we all want to sell the pipe, but it’s more like if someone was sitting down next to me and I was just pulling pipes out of my pipe collection when they already had a genuine interest in it. I’d start talking about what drew me to it, what I like about it.
[1] ‘The Pipe’ was first manufactured in 1963 by the Super-Temp Corporation, with production continuing through various names and iterations (Venturi, THE SMOKE, etc.) until around 1975. These pipes were notable for having bowls formed from pyrolytic graphite, rather than briar.
[2] Preben Holm (1947-1989) was a Danish pipe-maker and a seminal figure in the Danish ‘freehand’ pipe movement that emerged in the second half of the 20th century.
[3] A reference to the telepathic abilities of Vulcans, an alien race in the Star Trek franchise.
[4] Equivalent to 400-500 US dollars in 2024.
[5] Italian for ‘Gold Point,’ one of Savinelli’s higher-end pipe series.
[6] A particularly rare and collectible grade of Dunhill pipes, which began as the ‘OD’ and later transitioned to ‘OD’ followed by a letter designating further graduations within the OD grade. On the ‘OD’ grade and its history, John Loring’s guide, reproduced on Pipedia.org, is a worthwhile read. See https://pipedia.org/wiki/The_Early_Dunhill_OD
[7] A latakia-heavy blend originally sold by Dunhill.
[8] An early pipe forum hosted by the Google Group web application. See https://groups.google.com/g/alt.smokers.pipes
[9] An association for tea connoisseurs in the United States.
[10] Shorthand for estate pipes, i.e., pipes previously owned by another person.
[11] North American Smoking Pipe Collectors.
[12] One of the earliest e-commerce ventures for smoking pipes.
[13] Killarney and Aran are popular Peterson pipe series.
[14] Danish master artisan, formerly of Denmark’s iconic W.Ø. Larsen workshop and Dantonian Pipe Works (with his brother, Sven).
[15] Hiroyuki Tokutomi, Japanese master artisan.
[16] An artisan pipe brand formerly owned by, and named after, Svend Bang, whose carvers included Ivan Holst Nielsen, Jan Windelov, Jes ‘Ph. Vigen’ Gertsen, Per Hansen, and Ulf Noltensmeier. Hansen and Noltensmeier would later acquire the brand from Svend Bang and take sole charge of the production of S. Bang Pipes.
[17] ‘Hummingbird’ was an overhaul of Google’s search algorithm implemented in 2013. The change favored websites using text data presented in the form of natural language, rather than keywords. A ‘pound sign’ is what internet users today call a ‘hashtag,’ with its function of grouping content being relatively consistent, despite the change in terminology.
[18] American artisan pipe-maker and creator of the invaluable pipe Wiki Pipedia.org.
[19] A format used by American magazine Playboy for interviewing guests. I am not especially familiar with Playboy , but it may be that the format was ’20 Questions,’ rather than 10.
[20] An American artisan who works under the name, ‘Yeti.’
[21] A Russian artisan who works under the name, ‘Doctor’s Pipes.’
[22] An Italian workshop brand founded by Carlo Scotti in 1947.
[23] Wally Frank Ltd was a historic pipe tobacconist chain in the 20th century.
[24] A summary of the dispute between Wally Frank and Castello/Carlo Scotti can be found on Pipedia.org, as authored by Bear himself. See https://pipedia.org/wiki/Castello
[25] A particularly high-end Scotch Whisky.
[26] Gary Schrier was a notable author, historian, and raconteur on the subject of pipes.
[27] A flat, wide, bulldog-style shape which looks like someone in heavy snow gear from above.
[28] Not to be confused with Eltang’s ‘Saturn’ grade pipes; ironically, the only planet-shaped ‘Saturn’ pipe I know of was a ‘Snail’ grade.
[29] The highest grade of Hiroyuki Tokutomi pipes.
[30] Hans ‘Former’ Nielsen is a Danish master artisan, whose pipe-making moniker derives from his resemblance to English singer George Formby. Having started at W.Ø. Larsen under the direction of Sven Knudsen, Former later left to become a solo artisan.
[31] Dot pattern studies have been a recurrent feature in experimental psychology for around a century, beginning with the German Gestalt school. Participants are typically asked to judge series of dot patterns on qualities such as ‘goodness’ or ‘beauty,’ with many studies indicating that greater symmetry in the arrangement of dots correlates to greater judgements of goodness or beauty, as well as the inverse. These results, as well as the methodology used to arrive at them, continue to be debated, however.
[32] Rather than embarrass myself by trying to explain this one, I will simply link the Wikipedia article for the golden ratio. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
[33] A palatial garden in France, notable for its careful, geometrical arrangement.
[34] Someone who is a fan of Japanese culture.
[35] American actress who starred, among many other things, in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie The Birds .
[36] Kurt Balleby Hansen, Danish master artisan.
[37] A reference to Peter Paul Rubens, a painter often associated with the nude form, especially as features women.
[38] Todd M. Johnson, a highly influential artisan from the United States. Johnson has a Master of Arts (MA) degree from Yale University.
