Still time!
It’s looking like the Donor Table will be about half tins and half pipes, with some amazing NOS, recent, and vintage Petes as well as artisan pipes, a beautiful Austrian gourd calabash with briar inset, and much more, including two incredible artisan works by Fletch Hiner! The GoFundMe remains at 22% or $3783 of the anticipated $17.3K we need.
I’ll have the original blog post cleaned up and provide a summary next week as things are much more in focus with what needs to be done, what our timeline, and how I’m hoping we’ll be able to meet our goal. FOR NOW let me thank the amazing Pete Geeks who’ve mailed me boxes and boxes of incredible pipes, tins, and accessories. We’ll celebrate them the week after the show with with a recap of the table, proceeds, and the show itself.
If you want to send pipes, tins, or accessories for the Charles Peterson Memorial donor table at the Texas Pipe Show on November 14th, time is running out. Write me at petegeek1896@gmail.com for the shipping address. And of course, don’t forget you can send a few bucks directly to GoFundMe. You can donate anonymously, you can send $5, you can do a world of good just by mentioning it on your social media platforms–I still haven’t heard if forums like those at PSOI or PipesMagazine.com have even mentioned it, and we were shut out of the recent Vegas show–but that’s another story.
Finally, if you’re coming to the Texas show and I haven’t been in touch with you, please consider meeting with us for breakfast at Dave’s Uptown Cafe in Cedar Hill, Texas, at 7:15. It’s the best kind of cooking and the long tables make for excellent fellowship. I know I will have forgotten someone and I’d like to get a head count to let the good folks at the cafe know.
“What A Difference A Stem Makes”:
A Note on the Great Explorers (2002) Stem Styles
One of several amazing bins of Petes at Ken Sigel’s Mystic Muppet Labs…
I got to browse Ken Sigel’s amazing Peterson collection last weekend, and one of the highlights was seeing in person the Mario Lubinski-Italian Market version of the 2002 Great Explorers Collection. If you’ve never seen these, or wondered about the story about the collection, it’s been documented back at PPN#107. This morning’s post, however, is just a footnote to that one while I’m processing the pipes and tins so many for the donor table at the Texas Pipe Show two weeks from now.
When I got home after my trip to Connecticut and was able to compare Ken’s Great Explorers set with my own, for some reason Dinah Washington’s classic “What A Difference A Day Makes” began playing in my head, substituting “stem” for “day.”*
I’ve written before about how crucial stems are to stummels and how Kapp & Peterson has explored the interplay often quite brilliantly over the years. Discovering how in the years leading up the 1975 Centenary Peterson hearkened back to the long Patent DeLuxe stems, which I call “Pachyderms,” was a big reveal for me (see PPN#416), and the difference the P-Lips make to the GE set is in its own way equally instructive.
The opportunity to see and hold Ken’s P-Lip set of the 2002 Great Explorers–which was created by Mario Lubsinski’s request for his Italian-market distribution, was super cool.
It looks like from the Lubsinki catalog that his set was produced in the gloss red stain. He actually provides some great shots of the pipes from one of his last Peterson electronic catalogs, so you can see the visual cues that make the two sets so different and create such a different aesthetic.
The first thing to notice is the appearance of longer stems on the P-Lip set. I didn’t have time to measure them, so can’t be sure. The Crean (above) is a bolder version of the 120, one that Tom Crean would surely have endorsed (he seems to have smoked the 124, a shape I wish I still had in my rotation).
The straight brandy of the set is one I didn’t appreciate for years and years. It was created with a diamond shank on the Y2K silver cap set, but there are subtle differences: the way the bowl dips below the shank, for instance, in the GE set.
What changed my mind was an impulse to try Germain’s Rich Dark Flake in this pipe. It was revolutoinary. Magic wood, no doubt, but I’ve never found another pipe in my rotation to match what this one can do.
The final two are direct inspirations from the story of the Endurance and its leaders.
The Scott, seen above, reminds me somewhat of the SH Professor as well as the B11. But that’s with the P-Lip. Put on it the shoulder-mount and there’s an entirely different aura:
The final entry, the Amundsen, is a virtual copy from one of the photographs of the Endurance’s voyage:
In the P-Lip this is the longest pipe of the set. The shape is so unique in my mind for not being a straight-sided dutch nor a billiard, but something between them both. Like the Scott, the Amundsen just delivers the goods in my set.
Intellectual property of Kapp & Peterson
reproduced by their kind permission.
*I can’t help adding that I first heard Washington’s song in what remains German director Tom Tykwer’s masterpiece, Run Lola Run (1998). The film’s symbolic narrative turns capitalism’s objectification of human beings on its head as protagonist Lola (played by Franke Potente) runs—literally runs—for most of the film’s 88 minute running time, trying to save Manny, the boy she loves, from the hands of the mob. Highly recommended, not least for the soundtrack.
