On Single Artisan Collecting

A pipe collector has almost endless choices when deciding what his collecting focus could be. He can, as I have with the zulu, decide to collect a particular shape. He can decide to collect pipes from a particular artisan, or produced by a specific manufacturer like Dunhill or Comoy. There can be a lot of satisfaction from any of the above approaches. For example, finally locating a rare or previously unseen shape in an historical brand like Comoy can be thrilling. It is in overcoming barriers that I feel the greatest satisfaction.

As someone who has been collecting for quite awhile now, I have come to appreciate the difficulty of collecting pipes from a specific artisan, especially from a pipemaker whose work becomes trendy or popular. The very qualities that compel one to want to collect work from that person becomes a barrier to building a good collection: popularity that results from very high quality work. I’ve had this experience with a number of artisans, but for the purposes of this post, I will focus on Adam Davidson as an example.

I started collecting Adam Davidson’s work very early on in his pipemaking career. Some of the best pieces in my collection come from his early years, e.g. the pair of melting bulldogs that are in every way representative of a very unique point-of-view. Were Adam to produce those pieces now, chances are slim to none that I would be able to acquire them. There is simply too much competition to buy his work from other collectors.

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Sixty

1933 Dunhill Root Briar AppleLast week was, perhaps, the best pipe week I can remember. Three pipes came to me as gifts – each of them meaningful and wonderful in so many ways – for my 60th birthday.

I cannot imagine turning 60 years old, even though it has actually happened. Rarely does my imagination lag behind reality. Quite the contrary; my imagination has been known to drag emerging reality (or parts of it) kicking and screaming into being. Usually, my will’s little endowments are made manifest through desire. Occasionally, they are the children of dread. This milestone, however, tramped heavily into last week like a Boston beat cop rousting a loiterer. He came. He saw. He was unwelcome. He came anyway.

These gifts not only softened the arrival of my “graybeard” status, they sweetened it. Considerably. There is nothing like having affection manifest itself into little smoking totems. Pipes: the best birthday present ever – except perhaps gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Still….pipes are great.

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Steve Liskey: "Bamboo First"

Two bamboo pipes commissioned from Steve Liskey“Why would anyone want to put bamboo with briar?”

I’ve heard these words more than once – sometimes from prominent collectors. I’ve even heard them in my mind’s ear as I wondered the same thing, myself.

Ever since Sixten Ivarsson married briar to bamboo during World -War-Two while trying to make use of in-short-supply briar blocks, many have posed the same question: “Why bamboo?”

I’m not sure when I had a change of heart. I do know that bamboos are now among my favorite pipes to smoke and admire.

Bamboo – a material I used to consider tawdry and cheap – is now as character-filled and fascinating to me as briar. The range of colors, textures, and characters one can encounter in the approximately 1,450 species of bamboo is astonishing. Bamboo can be as quiet, distinguished, and elegant as ivory or ebony. It can also be as gnarly, gritty, and funky as a Newark railroad bridge. While I love both extremes, I find myself increasingly drawn to bamboo with distinctively gritty and gnarly character. I enjoy the contrast that exists when dissimilar materials exist in counterpoint.

To create a seamless shank extension using bamboo is not easy nor without its painstaking moments as any artisan who uses bamboo will tell you. This is why one sees some beautifully grained or exquisitely sandblasted briar in bamboo pipes. Mediocre blocks are not worth the trouble.

Bamboo Apple by Michael LindnerPerhaps because bamboo was initially used as a way to extend a pipe shank, bamboo can often look like a crude interloper in an otherwise elegant composition. Used poorly, there is no relationship between the bowl height or width, the foreshortened shank length, and the distance between knuckles. Used artfully, the distance between the bowl shank transition and the first knuckle will mirror one another, setting up a visual rhythm that is often terminated with a final vulcanite knuckle. The best saddle stems continue the visual repetition by being as long as the distance between knuckles. In summary, in the best bamboo pipes, the bamboo dictates the overall composition, or it is a reflection of the existing proportions of the stummel.

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A Labor of Love

Thursday, advance copies of the Fall issue of Pipes and Tobaccos Magazine arrived at my doorstep from the magazine’s printing facilities in the midwest. Coincidentally, just minutes before I received a text message from Adam Davidson with a picture of the copy he had just been handed by Sykes Wilford at Smokingpipes.com.

This issue features one of my favorite pipemakers and people: Adam Davidson. I wrote the cover story about him and created the story’s and cover image, as well. The project has been a labor of love that began about a year ago with a call from the magazine’s editor, Chuck Stanion, inquiring if I would take on the assignment. I could hardly get “yes” out of my mouth fast enough. Since I met Adam and started collecting his work five years ago, my respect and affection for him have grown steadily.

I confess I struggled a bit writing this story. Adam is more than the subject of an article to me. He is a friend whose story I have watched unfold within which I have been a bit player. There were more than a few days where I found myself sitting and staring at a blank computer screen, immobilized by writer’s block.

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Bamboozled

From top: Chestnut by Jess Chonowitsch, Chestnut by Jess Chonowitsch, Apple by Michael Lindner, Pot by Jess Chonowitsch, Raindrop by Yuki TokutumiHere in Northern Virginia’s mild Atlantic climate, if you plant bamboo in our fertile soils it will thrive like a native grass. You’ll have a dickens of a time ridding yourself of it once it has established itself.

Vigorous and aggressive, it is said that bamboo groves grow so quickly in some climes that if you were to listen inside a quiet grove that you could literally hear its crackling growth. It just takes over.

It would seem that bamboo is as capable of taking root and thriving in a pipe collection as it is in the soil. While it hasn’t started crowding out the rest of my collection, I wonder if it might happen someday. My bamboo and briar companions are among my very favorite pipes. They are like women whose charm, character, and personality combine to make them irresistible - the kind that the longer you look at and touch them, the more beautiful they become.

A particular favorite pipe in my rotation is the little spaghetti bamboo pictured at the top of this post from the American artisan Adam Davidson. Its sandblasted walls, though thin, stay eerily cool and its thin, comfortable bit makes the pipe feel as natural as my very own teeth. My wonderful experience with this pipe led me to purchase both the black bamboo cherrywood and the smooth, bamboo pot pictured below. It may surprise you to know that I haven’t always liked bamboo pipes very much. Early on, I didn’t like them at all.

I remember my first encounters with bamboo-shanked pipes. Their scarred, knobby, and fibrous shank-scapes seemed awkwardly ill-conceived, like somebody tried to graft a cottonwood branch onto a magnolia tree. Worse, the more mesmerizing the briar grains were, the more out-of-place the bamboo seemed. With apologies to George Gobel, bamboo and briar seemed like brown shoes in a world of tuxedos.

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