533. “What A Difference A Stem Makes”: A Note on the Great Explorers (2002) Stem Styles
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…