The X Pipe

 

PSA

I received an email from Peterson on Thursday that there has been a delay in the delivery of the PPN Commemorative pipes to SPC, but that these should be ready for everyone to order next week.  Hold fast!

Lunting Bear

I’m going to venture off the trail just a little this morning to share a selection from The X Pipe & Other Mystagogic Stories for the Pipe Smoker, which has just been released internationally through Amazon’s KDP print service.

The X Pipe had its launch at the Chicago Pipe Show last spring (see Post #394), and we took a few boxes of a special first edition Gigi prepared using a high-quality paper stock and ink. At the show, Smokingpipes.com generously agreed to carry this edition, which can still be obtained through them.

Since then, I’ve been stymied as to how to promote the book, which has languished without advertising aside from the Chicago show and this blog.  It occurred to me that as there are as many readers of PPN outside the US as inside it, in fact, in 101 of the 106 nations recognized by the United Nations.  I know from emails with many of them that postage is an issue with anything they purchase overseas, often doubling the price of an item, not to mention VAT or customs.  I also know our non-US Pete Geek are avid readers, as their comments and emails following the posts on Kapp & Peterson in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (Post #210), Joyce’s Ulysses (Post #285) and the posts on Mark Twain all attest.

After kicking around the problem, I decided to see if I could not only accommodate these PGs as well as get the word out by making The X Pipe available through a program at Amazon that would allow it to be sold through nearly all their world online outlets (and doubtless at their Ireland site, which debuts in January).  Here are the direct links:

Amazon.com.au : Australia
Amazon.com.br: Brazil
Amazon.ca : Canada
Amazon.fr : France
Amazon.de: Germany
Amazon.it : Italy
Amazon.co.jp : Japan
Amazon.com.mx: Mexico
Amazon.nl : Netherland
Amazon.sg : Singapore
Amazon.co.uk: United Kingdom
Amazon.es : Spain
Amazon.se : Sweden
Amazon.ae : United Arab Emirates
Amazon.co.uk: United Kingdom
and of course
Amazon.com : United States

Amazon.in : India [not listed]
Amazon.sa : Saudi Arabia [not listed]
Amazon.cn : China [alright, I couldn’t read the characters at this site—do let me know if you see it, PGs in China!]

While Gigi couldn’t choose paper and ink quality as she did on the first edition, by revising the imaging of text and illustrations she was able to bring it to her impeccable standards and is pleased enough with the results to release it in this new edition.

Launching an independently published pipe book is not a money-making or probably even sane idea, especially when it’s not even about a specific brand of pipes but about pipe smokers and their philosophy of smoking.  When you add an intention to be comic (perilous) and give it a faux-academic dress (ponderous),  the writer has pretty well painted himself into a corner and no way out.  I’d add that this pipe book “goes to 11,” echoing Spinal Tap, but who even remembers those guys aside from Chris Tarman and Steve Mowby?

Nevertheless, this morning I offer you a sample of what this tongue-in-cheek “philosophical novel” is like (and no, Dostoevsky fans, it ain’t quite as funny as The Brothers Karamosov). If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a review at one of Amazon’s global sites. If you don’t care for it, well, you probably won’t make it to the end of the post so I won’t worry about it.

If you happen live in one of Amazon’s non-US markets and like it, this X Pipe‘s for you (well, okay, it’s on the US Amazon site as well). . . . And in case you’re wondering, this book conveniently fits in most Christmas stockings.

 

From Ch. 2,
The Five Laws of Pipe Companioning

  “Pipes are occasionally of extraordinary interest,” said he. “Nothing has more individuality save perhaps watches and bootlaces. The indications here, however, are neither very marked nor very important. The owner is obviously a muscular man, left-handed, with an excellent set of teeth, careless in his habits, and with no need to practice economy.”

—Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Yellow Face” (1893) [1]

Lake Geneva’s Jet d’Eau

Skipping ahead almost twenty years after the events recorded in the previous chapter, picture Charles Mundungus and myself—now good friends—smoking our pipes on his piazza with three others as we watched the sun set over Lake Geneva. The sky was streaked with dark cirrus clouds making shimmering waves of beaten gold against the rainbow spanning beneath the flume of the Jet d’Eau. It was the third week of our pipeman’s holiday and the day had been spent quietly apart from a trip to Au Boa Fumant, one of the few remaining pipe shops in Geneva. It was a few minutes past nine on a June evening, 25° C, very pleasant and we were enjoying after-dinner pipes. The Brit, the Italian and the Dane were sipping Balvenie Peat Week from Davidoff’s. Mundungus and I were drinking our usual iced tea.  The talk had been about famous collectors who had died in the past few years.

Mundungus was pensive and uncharacteristically silent—probably because he hadn’t acquired a new pipe that day.  He let out a dramatic sigh, relit a well-beloved Peterson System and announced in his ex cathedra voice, Why do we call it “collecting”? It’s a sterile, cold, mechanistic word, like our pipes are bugs pinned to a board. Not at all suitable to describe our appreciation of them.

We expected this sort of outburst from Charles, so we said nothing but waited for him to go on. Pointing at the Italian’s pipe with the stem of his own he said, Hold it up.  We can’t regard that as Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table.” It’s a companion, for Mercy’s sake, not a lab specimen.  Not an artifact, a commodity or a consumer item. The Italian grinned sheepishly holding aloft one of Maurizio Tombari’s curiously fluid straight grains.

Nonsense, said the Dane, in the courtroom voice you expect from the retired partner in a successful Long Island law firm. That’s just silly, he said, blowing clouds of latakia from a little Tao bent bulldog.  How can a pipe be a companion? Do you have talks with it? Does it manage your money? Meet you at the club for golf on Sundays? A pipe is just a piece of wood with a straw stuck into it for smoking tobacco, despite our obsessive fascination with it. He may have spoken only partially in jest, but he was in earnest baiting Charles, as they had widely different religious and political views.

Charles rarely met anyone’s eyes when he spoke and continued to gaze abstractly at the Jet d’Eau, which had turned dark bronze as the sun lowered.  Nicholai de Tabakkuk, he began, thought there are certain laws governing pipe companionship and I believe he was right. He didn’t originate the concept, but borrowed it from a tobacconist he knew when he was in India.

You have laws about pipes? laughed the Dane despite himself. I call him “the Dane” not to depersonalize him, but merely because as a pipeman, he loves nothing so much as the Danish masters and their heirs—artisans like Jens Tao Nielsen, Jess Chonowitsch, Lars Ivarrson, Jeff Gracik.  Outside the courtroom he is actually a genial soul and aside from pipes loves nothing more than pipe talk.

“The Brit” (who really is from the UK but really does love Charatan, Dunhill, Comoy’s and other British marques above all others) spoke as he set his pipe in the ashtray. Can’t we enjoy a quiet smoke without turning it into sophomoric sophistries or reification? Without engaging in what Marx terms “commodity fetishism”?

He was a political economist and loved to bring up Karl Marx whenever anyone would listen, which wasn’t often in the present company. Sometimes prickly, he apparently thought it his duty at this point to open up a second front and carpet bomb the tranquility of our evening.

Charles, however, was already landing troops on the beach: I don’t have laws governing anything he said to the Dane. The laws are those of Nicholai de Tabakkuk, he said turning to the Brit, and it’s really impossible to understand him within the hermeneutical constraints of Marxism—

The Dane interrupted him. Charles, did you ever discover who this Tabakkuk person really was? Didn’t you say he was a monk or something?

Friar, actually, said Mundungus. Not quite the same as a monk, but close. Yes, Michael Sparks and I have finally cobbled the biography together thanks to the boxes serendipitously recovered when the University of Virginia demolished part of their main library not long ago.

The boxes of what? interjected the Dane.

I replied, Documents pertaining to The Brethren of St. James, an old Franciscan friary in the Tidewater of Virginia. Charles, the Dane and the Brit were the elder statesmen of our group, while the Italian, although in the pipe trade, was the youngest. While Charles and I had been close friends for almost a decade, whenever we were in company with the others I readily climbed into the back seat, eager to avoid their disapprobation.

So regale us, Sparks, the Brit said, always fascinated with the history of pipes.

By all means, said the Dane. Then Charles and I can get on with these supposed “laws” of his.

I was happy to oblige, despite the Dane’s condescension. I don’t know why it is, I thought to myself, but as men grow older, they too often become nastier rather than kinder. Even some pipe smokers, apparently.

Well, in nuce, I began, We had nothing but what we thought of as imaginative speculation regarding Tabakkuk’s biography until discovering the reprint of A Pipeman’s Mystagogy by C. S. Lewis’s brother Warnie. The friary’s documents enabled us to match his name with his nom de plume from the friary’s circular letter regarding his death. They also contained dates and places that allowed us to authenticate some of Lewis’s biography.

Fr. Liam Malone, OFM (seated with open book)

Liam Malone—which was Tabakkuk’s Christian name—was born October 11, 1847, in Donnybrook, County Dublin. His family moved to Belfast, where at 14 he began work as a carpenter in the Harland & Wolff shipyard. He ran into trouble and moved to London, where he again found work as a carpenter, this time in the old Blackwall Yard.  Malone was a huge man—over six feet—handy with a knife and prone to strong drink. In 1867 he was transported to Australia on the last convict ship, the Hougoumont, for manslaughter. The trial was recorded in a few of the gaudier dailies at the time as he’d killed his superior at the shipyard in a bar brawl.

On the voyage, Malone became angry with the ship’s chaplain, Patrick Bryne, a small but feisty priest, who challenged Malone, saying  that “if God could use David to slay Goliath, he can use me to pull thee from Satan’s grip.” Bryne held his ground but was no match for the younger Malone, who knocked him down with a single blow. Malone thought he had killed the little Ulsterman, and was so abashed that he picked him up and carried him below to the sick bay. When Bryne woke up he asked for his pipe and when he had it lit tried to get up, saying “By Jesus, Mary and Joseph I’m going to thrash you now!” Malone laughed and afterwards nursed the little priest back to health, receiving his catechism from him as well as taking up the pipe.

When the Hougoumont landed in Port Adelaide, Fr. Bryne took Malone with him to the Franciscan mission in Gawler, where he divided his time between carpentry and learning to read and write. Helping complete the small bluestone St. Joseph’s church in Port Melbourne, Malone afterwards accompanied Byrne as secretary first to the Monastery of Saint Savior in Jerusalem and then to the Kerala coast of India. Bryne was gathering manuscripts of the early Syriac communities of Saint Thomas.  He contracted cholera, however, and after a protracted illness died—

That’s enough church history, interrupted the lawyer with a yawn.  Always hypersensitive, his disinterest stung and I fell silent.

Well, said Charles, who was rarely ruffled by anyone, Michael Sparks was only trying to say Tabakkuk’s five laws of pipe companioning aren’t original. He had it from the grandfather of S. R. Ranganathan, the mathematician and pioneer of library science. The grandfather was the proprietor of a tobacco shop in Bangalore, India, and it was he who gave the young Ranganathan the idea for what would become the famous Five Laws of Library Science. [2]  “Dadi,” as the grandson called him, was devoted to tobacco in all its forms but most especially in a pipe. These laws were originally maxims about smoking he taught his customers, British officers and soldiers and the Indian middle and upper classes, in Madras (present-day Chennai) near Fort St. George.

Fort St. George, Madras

According to Tabakkuk, on any given day at the Ft. Saint George Cigar Emporium, Dadi Ranganathan would sell fifty or sixty boxes of cigars, two or three dozen pipes, twelve to fifteen pounds of pipe tobacco and mountains of cigarettes, not to mention the Indian chillums and chillum tobacco he sold out the back door. [3]

The word Dadi used for “law” or “maxim” in Hindi is नियम या कानून (niyam ya kaanoon), which means a normative principle, a rule of thumb, not a social rule, mathematical construct or scientifically-observable law. Dadi’s “laws” are simply the observable phenomena governing the practice. They aren’t something to debate, argue or legislate, but more like saying an apple has certain observable properties: skin, seeds, core, flesh and stem. You can’t debate an apple has these, you can only discuss its taxonomy and how it differs from other apples.  To say the apple doesn’t exist is absurd.

The laws or rules of good pipe smoking therefore describe what it is while remaining open to how it works and is best practiced at individual and community levels. To say the laws don’t exist is simply to live in denial of That Which Is (which of course, many people do). You may say the laws don’t exist in the same way you deny gravity, the color red or the power of love.

No one was the least surprised when Mundungus dug into the courier bag at the side of his easy chair to retrieve the portfolio he carried with him everywhere.

Listen to this—a letter Malone wrote to his brother Jimmy [who worked for Charles Peterson in Dublin] while working in Chennai:

Jimmy boy,

The heat of Madraspatnam [Chennai] is becoming unbearable & I think has laid Fr. Bryne low. I take refuge by visiting my friend Dadi R. at the Cigar Emporium every afternoon—the shutters on his shop windows contrive to let in the sea breeze yet keep it pleasantly dark. We drink masala chai, Smoake and chat. Dadi is a wise man and a good conversationalist. He also gets the Gallagher’s Twist in for me, altho of late officers at the fort have found out so I must bear the cross of Smoaking Carroll’s plug on occasion.  

When you step onto the wooden porch of the Emporium, Dadi has his “Pipe Rules” colourfully painted in Hindi under the shop name with a comely Indian maiden underneath. She draws a great deal of custom, I think. Entering the double doors, the same rules are elegantly gilt in English behind the counter as well as painted on the back door in Tamil near the Smoaking lounge where we drink our tea and Smoake.  Would ye pass them to Petherson [i.e., Charles Peterson] for me?  I know he likes this type of thing exceedingly.

I read neither Tamil or Hindi, but you can see how elegant Malone’s penmanship is here, said Charles, passing the letter around:

குழாய் விதிகள்

உங்கள் குழாய் புகை.
ஒவ்வொரு புகைப்பிடிப்பவர் தனது குழாய்.
ஒவ்வொரு குழாயும் புகைபிடிக்கும்.
உங்கள் குழாயைப் பாதுகாக்கவும்.
உங்கள் குழாய்கள் வளரும் உயிரினம். [4]

 

पाइप नियम

अपने पाइप को धूम्रपान करें।
हर धूम्रपान करने वाला अपना पाइप।
हर पाइप इसके धूम्रपान करने वाला।
अपने पाइप को सुरक्षित रखें।
आपके पाइप एक बढ़ते जीव हैं। [5]

In English they read, “PIPE LAWS—one, smoke your pipe; two, every smoker his pipe; three, every pipe its smoker; four, preserve your pipe; and five, your pipes are an unfolding story.” [6]

Charles flipped through the remaining pages, which he said talked about family, health and British politics. Lighting his pipe, he continued between puffs: As a boy, Dadi’s grandson spent summers and holidays helping in the shop and saw these rules every day, which would one day germinate in his famous laws of library science. Reflecting on them at length, Michael Sparks and I believe they are also the undiscovered Vishnu’s Basement of the art of pipe smoking, its primordial foundations.

 

1. Pipes Are for Use

How does “smoke your pipe” translate into the first law? asked the Dane. He had by now settled down with another single malt at hand and was interested.

Mundungus lightly tamped the ash in his bowl with a finger and relit.

Following grandson Ranganathan, I would recast Dadi’s phrase using his grandson’s redaction: “pipes are for use.” You’re thinking Vadit sine dicens—“it goes without saying.” Yes and no. Someone new to the hobby or attending a pipe show for the first time might think pipes are really for collecting.  I’ve heard both a theologian and a trucker say “if you don’t smoke a pipe, it’s just wood.”

We all know book collectors who don’t read. Librarians tell us that if it was never read, the book never comes to life. And when a book ceases to be read (sociologically, not individually), it has died. Likewise, if a pipe is never smoked, it never truly comes to life and when it ceases to be smoked, it dies. It may be a genuine work of functional art or a cheap industrial commodity, but it’s no longer a pipe. Books are made to be read; pipes to be smoked.

Waiting for Charles to stop speaking, the Dane broke in, Do you remember when Bill Unger popularized the maxim, “if you own one pipe you’re a pipe smoker; if you own two, you’re a collector”? That’s impossible today, isn’t it? We’re all collectors.

Mundungus frowned, but this was the sort of conversation he most enjoyed. The word “collector” simply won’t do, he continued. It has a pejorative smell. It stinks of conspicuous consumption or worse—lab specimens in jars of formaldehyde, bad horror movies and the rampant objectifying of reality so dear to the heart of advertising and industry.

The Dane shook his head: Seriously? What about art collectors? Collectors of antiquities? Your scruples are working overtime, Mundungus.  We are not either smokers or collectors. We’re both and today the vast majority in the hobby would identify at least to each other as collectors.

Perhaps, said Mundungus. But even as heuristic markers, I believe “smoker” and “collector” give us valuable grounds for reflection.

Consider: the absolute smoker is recherché these days. He will often call himself a “tobacco purist” and be consuming tobacco in cigars, cigarettes, pipes and even snuff and chew. He is distinguished by his sheer appetite for nicotine. Many of those in previous generations were of this type. C. S. Lewis and Samuel Clemens, two of my earliest literary heroes, were absolutists. One story tells how Lewis routinely dropped cigarette ash on his rug without giving a thought to using an ashtray, jocularly suggesting the ash killed germs. He was seldom without a pipe but never wrote about it to any extent. Those who knew him thought he smoked his pipe fully inhaling like a cigarette—and he was  a heavy cigarette smoker.

On the other hand, Clemens loved a good pipe, owned dozens and wrote a great deal about smoking but seems to have divided his time with cigars, smoking either one or the other continuously through the day. The absolute smoker is seldom fastidious, cares little for his pipe’s cleanliness or appearance, and in former days sometimes mistook it for a ball-peen hammer. These absolutists are not aficionados of the art of smoking but enthusiasts of tobacco in and of itself.

You’ll doubtless recall Clemens’s famous Peterson System given to the Boyhood Museum in Hannibal by his daughter Susie. The gap in the wear-fit stem is gone, the bowl burned down one side.  Even twenty years ago pipes with this type of abuse were common on the estate market where you’d sometimes see them “topped” before resale—that is, with their rims sanded down.

Equally rare is the absolute collector, who despite the pipe collecting fever of our era is an odd duck. In fact, I’ve only met two, one a living microcosm of the Pijpenkabinet Foundation. [7]   The other is a specialist in meerschaums. I’ve never seen either man actually smoking a pipe, but I suppose they must have, sometime. They are actually one-man museum curators with invisible No Smoking signs hung around their necks. One has never publicly shown his pipes. The other is eager for accolades for his scholarship, yet I fear they have both missed the fun of simply smoking.

But to return to your objection: the word “collector” isn’t just inadequate, it’s a false definition. It doesn’t describe the essential avocation all of us in this room share, which is surely to smoke and not merely to collect. You’re absolutely right, however, that we are none of us absolute smokers or absolute collectors. We wouldn’t be enjoying this pipemen’s holiday if we were.

The young Italian had been growing more restive and spoke up. Godfather (Mundungus was in fact his godfather), when you and I first discussed this on your last visit to Torino, it became a big topic of discussion among my clients. Three in particular seem to represent this law, at least as I see it at work in my shop.

One of my customers only “companions” (as you say) seven pipes. He comes in every week for a new tobacco or to revisit one of his favorites. His chief interest is in experiencing these tobaccos through the various bowl geometries of his rotation. None of his pipes is above the 200€ mark—two Radices, Chacoms, Cavicchis and a Peronelli. He smokes several bowls a day, so they get a real workout.  He’s an “absolute smoker,” but not like my great uncles and grandfathers, who smoked the same tobacco all day with the pipe always clenched between their teeth. He collects smoking experiences and is, in his way, a gourmand. He keeps a journal about them and is well known in Italy for the tobacco reviews he posts on various forums.

There’s a second man who comes in, a light smoker. Maybe two bowls a week when the weather is pleasant. He inherited his grandfather’s collection of Dunhill LCs a dozen years ago and thought he ought to smoke them.  Mostly I think he likes to read about and collect Dunhill. He’s a fussy man but always civil. He has a bilocale—a two-room flat—and his landlady won’t let him smoke indoors. So he smokes on his balcony or sometimes in the park. He comes in around a holiday like Ferragosto or Christmas to see if I have any new stock, reminding me each time he is in pursuit of every Dunhill shape. But he seems to be in no very great hurry, buying five or six pipes a year, depending on my inventory.  He’s very close to your profile of the “absolute pipe collector.”

Then there’s a third customer who has a good-sized collection, probably 300 pipes. I think he is most representative of those who are serious about pipe smoking these days, at least those with some means. He buys a new pipe from me almost every month, sometimes two. He has only a single unsmoked pipe, a Castello Fiammatta he bought from me three Christmases ago for around 1200€. He says he’s waiting for the right time, but I don’t think he’ll ever smoke it. He’ll end up trading it back to me—pipemen are funny about pipes they consider too expensive. They look at them but never smoke them. Other than the Fiammatta he smokes every pipe he owns, some a little and some a lot. Once a year he brings me a box of pipe rodate—estate pipes—for trade. His rotation is like most of ours, I imagine, always revolving. He smokes whatever’s new for a while then moves on to newer pipes, holding onto one that really speaks to him. To me, this is where many smokers are these days.

What about you? I asked.

Hmm.  It’s probably because I’m in the trade, although even before opening the shop I think I would have said that accumulation and the pleasures of ownership are part of my identity as a pipe smoker. My only true “collection” is the Castello shape 10 “Brucianaso”—Nose Warmer—which numbers about seventy pipes by now. I must have another three hundred pipes, some given to me at trade shows or by various makers, but most I’ve bought for myself. As I sit here smoking and thinking about it now, I do derive a great sense of happiness in accumulating and caring for my pipes. They’re part of who I am, even more so since I make my living by them.

But you’ve pushed a little needle into my balloon that’s beginning to make me uncomfortable.  I have a rotation of about two dozen pipes that sits on my desk, and when I smoke I always pick out one of these. Of my shape 10s, five are in the rotation and the rest I’ve never smoked, although each is unique and I enjoy looking at them a few times a year. Then there’s six or eight new pipes I haven’t smoked yet but know I will some day soon. I keep in them in their boxes on the table next to my easy chair to remind me.

The Italian paused to tamp and relight. From what you’ve said, it’s obvious that I only establish a real connection with a pipe when I smoke it; only then do I begin to feel something like affection towards it, which I suppose is my way of confessing that I believe “pipes are for use.”  What that use is and how the relationship should be described, though, seems very personal, even private. I don’t think it can be regulated or prescribed for others.

The Brit and the Dane were following the Italian’s words closely and I could sense they aligned themselves readily to his views, partly because he made everything concrete in a way Charles never could and partly because, like the Italian, they were both smokers and “rotating collectors.”

J. T. Cooke Cobra Bulldog

 For his part, Mundungus knocked out his pipe, set it in the ashtray and began loading a J. T. Cooke cobra bulldog. Doubtless, he began, my godson is right: we’re rotating collectors and our pipes are serial companions—

—Our collections evolve interrupted the Brit—

—Just so, replied Mundungus.  Our enjoyment of tobacco separates us from the absolute collector. Our fascination with the pipe as the vehicle for enjoying tobacco and as functional art separates us from the absolute smoker.

Certainly, said the Brit, never before in the history of pipe smoking have so many pipemen enjoyed buying, collecting, selling and talking about their pipes.

Or maintaining and restoring them, I added.

And that’s why, said Charles, I believe that to think ourselves as collectors is less than we and our pipes deserve.

Here I broke in. I think it was from Steve Laug that I first heard the the word “steward” used for pipe lovers.  He’s a brilliant Canadian pipe refurbisher, and when he says it he means it in the religious sense of someone who takes care of something. Maybe it’s a better word because it encompasses both collector and companion.

Kapp & Peterson Companion Case (1906)

There is historical precedent, however, for thinking of one’s pipes as companions, in the practice of those who bought fine pipes in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and protected them by ordering special “companion” cases, which were handmade from boxwood, lined with chamois or plush and leather-covered, holding anywhere from a single pipe to a seven-day set. The word thus evokes the rare smoker of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries who probably most resembled us as stewards who seek to collect as well as companion pipes.

There is also, I continued, a sacramental at work here—an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality most of us take for granted—viz., our pipes are companions in the dictionary sense of “companion: a comrade, one who accompanies or associates with another.”  In Latin, it originally referred to a Roman legionnaire who broke bread (pan) with (com) his fellow soldiers.

Companion!—there’s a word that never loses its charm, said the Brit. Yes, I quite like it. It fits how I think of my pipes, to be sure, as fellow soldiers and campaigners who suffer all the outrageous slings and thingummies of outrageous fortune right alongside us.

You know, he went on, I took a first in maths before going into political economy. It occurs to me as we’ve been talking that there’s a mathematical basis for collecting—that is, stewarding. We might call it the “Acquisition Axiom of Pipe Smoking.”  Think about it like this: the formula for exponential growth of a variable x at the positive growth rate r, as time t goes on in discrete intervals (that is, at integer times 0, 1, 2, 3, …), is  x_t = x₀ (1+r)^t. [8]  In the course of a pipe smoker’s life, fill in any time interval you like, and if his practice—or interest—remains at a relatively stable rate over time, he will generally be found to accumulate pipes and tobaccos at a geometric rate corresponding to his financial ability.

There may be exceptions that prove the rule, the Brit continued, but even absolutists like the American Samuel Clemens who routinely used up and discarded his pipes would have found it true on a smaller scale. But in today’s hobby the only real civic danger (assuming one’s fiscal responsibility) is the acrimonious grumbling of pipe envy or icy pipe arrogance encountered at shows or in various publications when those of differing resources make ego-status claims based on the rarity, cost or number of their pipes—or lack thereof.

It had grown quite dark by the time we’d all talked this over. I don’t know that we’d settled anything as of yet, although I’d heard Charles’s argument many times before and was growing to feel it didn’t quite fit the reality. The Dane, I could tell, would never swallow the word “companion” but in good fellowship wouldn’t protest any longer.  The Brit was now beaming with affability, but only because he’d managed to build his own understanding into the argument.

It’s late, the Dane yawned, rising to leave.

Good Lord so it is, said the Brit. This has been good stuff.  Anyone for a wee dram?  We acquiesced with pleasure, knocking our pipes out. . . .

 

NOTES

[1] Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Yellow Face,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, vol. 1 (W. W. Norton, 2007), 450–53.

[2] Set forth by S. R. Ranganathan in his classic The Five Laws of Library Science (Madras Library Association, 1931).  Librarians throughout the world accept these laws as foundational for the practice of good librarianship:

1. Books are for use
2. Every reader his book
3. Every book its reader
4. Save the time of the Reader
5. The library is a growing organism

[3] The historical facts regarding the origin of Ranganathan’s Five Laws seem to be at variance from those recorded here. See Birger Hjørland and Claudio Gnoli, “Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan,” International Society for Knowledge Organization, accessed September 7, 2023, https://www.isko.org/cyclo/ranganathan.

[4] Transliterated from Tamil:

Kuḻāy vitikaḷ

1. uṅkaḷ kuḻāy puka.,
2. ovvoru pukaippiṭippavar taṉatu kuḻāy.
3. Ovvoru kuḻāyum pukaipiṭikkum.
4. Uṅkaḷ kuḻāyaip pātukākkavum.
5. Uṅkaḷ kuḻāykaḷ vaḷarum uyiriṉam.

[5] Transliterated from Hindi:

paip niyam

1. apane paip ko dhoomrapaan karen.
2. har dhoomrapaan karane vaala apana paip.
3. har paip isake dhoomrapaan karane vaala.
4. apane paip ko surakshit rakhen.
5. aapake paip ek badhate jeev hain.

[6] Nicholai de Tabakkuk, Letters and Papers of Liam Malone (Albert and Birl Smallberries Special Collection, University of Virginia Library, n.d.). See also Nicholai de Tabakkuk, Frater Peripateticus, vol. 2 (Chatto & Windus, 1915), 260–62.

[7] Renamed “Amsterdam Pipe Museum,” accessed September 8, 2023, https://pijpenkabinet.nl.

[8] The Italian later told me, laughing, that this is simply the old Malthusian growth model.

End of Excerpt

 

Commentary

This excerpt from Ch. 2 (like the book), if it succeeds at all, has to succeed first as a story.  If it does that, then as far as my authorial intention is concerned, this particular chapter is “philosophically” about the intertwining of two things: first, the observable fact that there are “laws” of pipe smoking, i.e., observable phenomena governing the behavior of pipe smokers; and second, what philosophers and theologians call alterity—a concept concerned with our responsibility in how each of us relates to the other, pipe smoker to pipe smoker, pipe smoker to pipe, and even pipe smoker to what the smoker conceives as his or her “Higher Power.”

The “five laws” are debated by my characters in this chapter with their widely divergent interests, nationalities, politics, and spiritual values–all in the context of their shared belief in the great value of pipe smoking.  I wanted to represent, insofar as was conveniently possible, the wide spectrum of the practice as I’ve encountered it over the past 45 years or so.  I did this within the matrix of five men who, as friends, come together for an extended pipeman’s holiday in Europe.  Something not unlike an international pipe show, where we find all kinds of different understandings come together in the broad church of our enthusiasm over the gentle art of smoking.

When I first wrote and published this chapter for Luca di Piazza as a Christmas giveaway book many years ago, I was fortunate to have both Luca and Rick Newcombe offer their own perspectives of my views–which are presented in the fiction through the beliefs of Charles Mundungus.  I learned a great deal from Rick and Luca, which is given narrative form in this new and more open-ended version of the Five Laws.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Shae, a fellow Pete fan, wrote me this week asking if I could tell him about a unique NOS Peterson tie-in set he’s putting up for sale. While most of this is found in the big Pete Book, for any Pete Geek with an interest in the Early Republic era, these are a real find. In fact, they look very much inspired by three Peterson shapes in the catalog at that point: the 9BC, the 999 John Bull, and the 80s. There’s a reason for that, as they were for K&P’s “friend,” Peterson’s Ltd. of NY. Here’s the story: These were made for sale through one of the Peterson’s Ltd. of NY shops (they had 3 in New York City).  These shops were run by the son of Harry Rogers, of Rogers Imports Ltd., who was Peterson’s US distributor from the late 1950s until the late 1970s—at his death, Junior ran everything into the ground, losing the shops, his wife (ouch!) and the distributorship.  Harry had set up the shops for Junior to use the Peterson logo and name, carry Peterson pipes and Peterson-branded (but not blended) tobaccos.  Junior had little use for Peterson pipes, preferring more prestige lines, so we see few Petes in the Peterson’s Ltd. mail order catalogs.

Peterson’s Ltd. got their best briar from French exporters—some fantastic stuff, as you see here, and I have no doubt these are Algerian. Natural high-grade briars like this were greatly sought-after by pipe smokers in the 1950s and early 1960s. They will color beautifully.

A shop-stamped pipe like this is always something truly special, but only to the collector or companioner who understands what he’s holding. For the devoted Pete Geek with the right interests, these are an incredible find.

Finally, Pete Geeks, remember we can always tell if a pipe stamped “Peterson’s” was made in Dublin by looking at the reverse shank stamp: if it says IMPORTED BRIAR, it’s a Peterson’s Ltd of NY.

If you want more information on acquiring the set, you can contact Shae at vintagepipesnewengland@gmail.com.

Scott Forrest CPG.  Scott is one of the great Pete Geek collectors, always bringing delight when he sends me a fresh batch of photos.  Take a look at these recent acquisitions:

Scott writes:

Here are some old Peterson pipes (all unsmoked) that might be interesting to the group. Top to bottom, left to right:

London & Dublin 263 (164) pre-1962
Killarney Natural 120 with ‘Dry Smoking Bevel Lip’ from 1950’s
Dublin & London 150
Straight Grain 80S with bone tenon from 1950’s
London & Dublin 155

I hasten to point out that Scott let’s us take a look at what’s always so fascinating in a Pete–the tenons!  In addition to the bone condenser, look at the two “stingers,” the ball end and the corkscrew.

Alessandro Corradini sent a beautiful 87 Apple with the “Flat Grip” stem and fumed top.  It looks exactly like the ones made in the mid-1960s for K&P in their initial collaboration with Manxman. And look at the cheeking on that apple! Don’t see them kind of apples anymore, do we?