477. To Have What You Love / To Love What You Have (An X Pipe Appendix)
PSA #1 SYSTEM DAY 2025 IS ALMOST HERE T-Minus 72 Hours & Counting! submit your entry by Tuesday @ 12 noon CDT-- details for submissions @ end of post PSA #2 NOW BACK IN STOCK AT SMOKINGPIPES.COM! Photo courtesy Tom Cuffe CPG The second printing of The Historic 1906 Catalog, in an edition of 150 copies, is now available at Smokingpipes.com. As with all good publishing--in case you didn't know--a new printing means an opportunity to make corrections. In this case, Gigi, our resident Perfectionist Book Designer, said "there are few minor annoyances I want to correct before it goes out again." Gene Umberger CPG, one of the world's greatest line editors (probably the greatest) also had a swing at it, uncovering things I never saw and you may never see, but he did. Like Mary Poppins, one of my favorite literary characters, the book is now "practically perfect in every way." We've used the same incredible printer (Book Baby), so once again there will be an art book visual experience, with text and images popping off the page. This morning I'm pleased to have Michael Sparks and his good friend and fellow Pete Geek Charles Mundungus expound on the theme for this year's System Day in a conversation from earlier this summer-- TO HAVE WHAT YOU LOVE / TO LOVE WHAT YOU HAVE (An X Pipe Appendix) by Michael Sparks Every spring I spend a week in June with my good friend Charles Mundungus, who has an airy, spacious apartment on Lake Geneva’s south bank in Switzerland. I can do this because Chas, a long-retired concert pianist, sends me airfare. But I also do this because we’re old friends who’ve been on many pipe-hunting campaigns together, more or less across the globe, and we love nothing so much as what Abba Mark Hunt CPG calls "the '3Ps' of pipes, ponderings, and prayers,” the last of these being as much earnest conversations about life as the folded-hands-on-bended-knees variety, although we do go to mass together on Sunday mornings. Not the same 3Ps, but excellent, nonetheless After recovering from jet lag and breakfasting on black coffee and kannelbullar, those wonderful Swedish cinnamon rolls at O Martine! Chas and I visited Chris Bühler’s Au Boa Fumant (“At the Sign of the Smoking Snake” I think?).* He wanted to check on a sack of estate pipes as well as show me the “secret” pipe museum down in the cellar that Chris (now long retired) had left behind. I wanted to see if there weren’t some of Samuel Gawith’s “Unobtainium” (that’s Cabbie’s Mixture to the uninitiate), which is no longer imported to the US. Of course, I also wanted to see if there were any Petes I couldn’t live without. *Cough.* We lunted back to the apartment, Charles having us take a fairly circuitous route since smoking now forbidden in so many outdoor places in Geneva, and he’s been given three or four tickets since the bans went into place in 2023. I didn’t mind, as I…