Trendwatching: There will increasingly be great pipes and good buys in the British-made estate market.

For decades, quite a few of the pipe hobby’s most serious collectors have focused on collecting British-made pipes by Dunhill, GBD, Sasieni, Comoy, Parker, BBB, and – one of my favorites – Barling. Like my own father, many of these collectors were from “The Greatest Generation” – those who survived the Second World War.

Sadly, these men are reaching or have reached the end of their days, and their collections are being dismantled and sold in the estate market. Some of these collections are extraordinary; others are full of pipes that have been smoked extensively.

If you pay attention to the estate market, you have undoubtedly noticed that there are significantly more British-made pipes for sale. I predict that the supply will continue to increase, and disproportionately to the number of buyers out there.

We are already seeing the biggest implication of this demographic shift: significantly lower prices for fine British collectibles. I’ve seen what many would consider fairly rare pipes selling for prices that were unthinkable five years ago.

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A Landaw Barling Billiard

I stopped into Smokingpipes store earlier this month while I was in Myrtle Beach recently. While I was there, I was allowed to peruse the English estates in the Pipe Library upstairs. There are hundreds of pipes in Smokingpipes’ inventory that don’t make it to the web site for months on end, so visiting is a great opportunity to find some real treasures.

I happened onto a box full of old Barlings. This old sandblasted billiard was among them. My eye was drawn to the beautifully craggy sandblast. This blast style results from the stummels being left in a rotating drum where the media blasts away at whatever the nozzle happens to be pointing. These old blasts are revealed by differential grain density patterns randomly encountering the blasting media. Chance, pure and simple, makes these sandblast finishes what they are.

This particular size, the EXEL, is my favorite among Barling’s offerings because they have a nice capacity but are not too big. (L: 5.45” 139mm, H: 1.58” 40mm, Ø: .75” 19mm)

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Longings

Bent Bulldog by Barling (pre-transition)Earlier this month, I had a blissful week of pipe-smoking. A professional engagement took me to Park City, Utah for a week where I spoke a couple of times on the intersection of individual identity and community. My client lodged my wife and me at the St. Regis Deer Crest Resort which sits perched at about 8,000 feet on a mountain saddle above Deer Valley. A spacious patio was immediately outside our rooms. I spent several hours out there every morning in a heavy sweater, sipping coffee and watching the sun dawn over the surrounding Wasatch Range.

I welcomed the crisp, 50-degree sunny mornings with my pipes. They were a big change from the searing, humid weeks I’d spent recently in Washington and in Arkansas. I had just returned from an outdoor photo shoot where we worked for a week of 16-hour days. Although I’d taken my pipes with me, it was so hot and I was so wilted that I never unzipped my pipe bag.

It has been so unrelentingly hot this summer, that I have smoked my pipes very little. Between the heat and the mosquitos, I have ventured onto the patio few times this summer, except to grill fish or water my Japanese maple.

So, for me, Park City was a time to reflect, to think, to smoke my pipes, and to take a breather. Few places so calm and inspire me as the high Rocky Mountains. I grew up in similar environs, just outside Yellowstone Park on the eastern slopes of Wyoming’s Absaroka range. The scent of evergreens and mountain grasses is no less evocative to me than a Seamus Heaney sonnet or a Bach partita. My love for the Rockies was planted so early in my being that now, in my 58th year, its taproot encircles and cradles my heart.

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