Thanks for re-ingniting my interest in Maigret!Here's a pic of George Simenon with an open tin on the desk. I can't make out then blend though.
View attachment 126491
The tin lid looks familiar. May be Royal Yacht.
"I think I must have been transplanted by the winds to this land of mud; surely I was born elsewhere - I've always had what seem like memories or intuitions of perfumed shores and blue seas. I was born to be emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke 100 foot-pipes, to have 6 thousand wives and 1400 catamites, scimitars to slice off heads I don't like the look of. Numidian horses, marble pools - and I have nothing but immense, insatiable desires, frightful boredom and incessant yawns. Also a broken pipe and dried-out tobacco.
Shit! Adieu; keep well."
Much about smoking but no detail on tobacco choice :Alan Watts
Isaiah Berlin
Bertrand Russell
I feel Melville MUST have smoked a pipe, he writes so much about 'em