Yearly Archives: 2023

Nollaig Shona! PSA: See end of post for the 2024 Dubliner Donegal Tweed Flat Cap Event     “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) I recently read an article in The International Journal of Consumer Studies that was illuminating and sobering here at Christmas, one which somehow puts me in mind of the cautionary visits of the three spirits to Ebenezer Scrooge.[1]  In it, the authors look at the global surge in collecting behavior to find six large motivations: Achievement through Collecting Social Membership Cooperation and Competition Societal and Personal Memories Legacy Financial Value If we stop for a moment to think about our devotion as Pete Geeks to our favorite marque, I suspect we’ll all find one or more of these apply to our own fascination with Peterson pipes. At pipe shows and through emails I’ve talked with enough hobbyists to know that all six eventually come into play where pipes and tobaccos are concerned. For many, pipes are a source of meaning, grounding and comfort—1, 2, 4 and 5 in the list. Sometimes, as in an acrimonious exchange I witnessed from the sidelines this week, it can be filled with the bile of competitive achievement and chains to whip those who don’t approve of or agree with our own obsessions. Insofar as I understand the readership of PPN, I think what we do is mostly done in a cooperative spirit of appreciation and learning. Maybe that's because this isn't a forum, and it's certainly true that I detest trolls, but honestly, in the thousands of comments this blog has received in almost 10 years, there hasn't been more than four or five snarly remarks. There's another side to collecting behavior, of course, and it's important to realize that the marketplace--the pipes & tobaccos marketplace--is, as a niche or “boutique” industry, driven by the collecting behavior of consumers. Witness the serialized release of not only pipes but now of tobacco tins, of the weekly "special" editions and short runs, and the scarcity marketing and advertising tactics that sometimes drive us crazy and other times catch us short of the necessary wherewithal to make a desired purchase. The competing models of scarcity and abundance—of Marley (unreformed) and Scrooge (reformed) are nothing new in either the marketplace or one's personal outlook, of course. The trick is to know where you want to land. I think there are two helpful guides here.  One is the old slogan from Tracy Mincer’s Custombilt pipes : “As individual as a thumb-print.” The other is the late “Trucker” Chuck Wright’s admonition “There’s always another pipe.” Between the two, we may find a useful way to think about the innumerable choices that face us as pipe companioners: “Individual as a thumb-print.” Princeton…