Famous Historical Pipe Smokers

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antonine

Starting to Get Obsessed
Sep 18, 2024
110
653
San Diego, CA
More of a cigar guy, but G.K. Chesterton!

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Hillcrest

Lifer
Dec 3, 2021
3,797
19,288
Connecticut, USA
Can any of you kind souls identify that pipe for me?
He smoked Field and Stream Walnut tobacco and others and had a wide variety of pipes.


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This is also interesting ... he jokes his pipe collection is worth a 1/4 million ... ???
 
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Choatecav

Part of the Furniture Now
Dec 19, 2023
545
1,469
Middle Tennessee
Professor J R R Tolkien, co-founder of the Inklings and creator of Middle Earth. He smoked Capstan Medium Navy Cut. And, of course, Longbottom Leaf, Southern Star, and Old Toby.
View attachment 345303
Something kept calling me back to this picture of Tolkien. I finally figured out that it was unlike most of the people pictured, he was not posing for this shot and as a result we get a good idea as to how he held his pipe, at least some of the time.
Notice that not only is he a clencher but he clenches far back in his jaw to the point that the pipe looks to be held almost perpendicular to the direction of his head. I guess it makes good sense for a writer who spends much time looking down at his writings or those of others. Keeps pipe well out of the way.
 

MisterBadger

Part of the Furniture Now
Oct 6, 2024
628
4,619
Ludlow, UK
Alfred Lord Ternnyson, British Poet Laureate (1809-1892), a dedicated pipe smoker and, though he was a much-photographed man for his time, I haven't been able to find a photo of him actually with one of his pipes. He is known to have had a rack of 14 pipes (including a Powhatan Native American pipe sent him from the USA, which he also smoked), using them in a fortnightly rotation. Photos of his pipes are out there on the web, but all those I've found are either copyrighted or in non-shareable .webp format - but they include a couple of clays, a straight Meerschaum egg and a bent Meer egg with an amber stem, the shank twice mended with white metal collars, clearly much smoked and loved. What he enjoyed in his pipe, who knows? Perhaps there's an archive of his personal papers somewhere, like his former home at Farringford Manor on the Isle of Wight, which includes detailed bills from his tobacconist...
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