Hi All! My name is Jeff. I often find myself reading threads here and finally decided "Why not just join the forum?"
My father smoked a pipe when I was a kid (he mainly chain smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, though.) I loved the smell of his cherry Borkum Riff that he bought by the large tin. That's kind of how I got interested in pipes. I was an avid cigar smoker in the '90s and greatly reduced my cigar and pipe smoking after my father died from lung cancer in 2002. My friend who I work on a magazine with took an interest in cigars recently and that renewed my interest in cigar and pipe smoking, and I dived back in the last year or so, thoroughly enjoying sharing the experience of having cigars with my friend. It's getting a little too cold outside to have my cigars, so I find myself smoking my pipes indoors a lot more.
My pipe (and pipe tobacco) tastes are somewhat eclectic. I tend to gravitate towards squat Bulldogs and Rhodesians, large Authors, and Bent Billiards when it comes to classic shapes, but also enjoy unique figural pipes. On occasion, I've spent way more than I should've because I couldn't stop looking at or thinking about a particular pipe, and knew from my years and years of book collecting that regret always comes in the form of the ones that you didn't buy; you can always forgive yourself for spending too much—invariably, that's better than spending the next several years hunting down the one that got away. Pipes are unusual in that they are functional art. It seems a shame to light up a collectible unsmoked pipe, but that's like not reading a first edition book—the object ceases to function as it's supposed to; the difference is I can read a paperback of the same book title while preserving the condition of the rare first edition. My pipe collecting is already getting out of hand; the current rationalization is having various shapes to rotate for the various blends I smoke—it's madness I tell you, but I love it.
