Pipes by Country
- Thread starter Cloozoe
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I dont care where a pipe is made but certain geographic regions tend to lean differently in design tastes. Of course thats a general tendency, not a rule. For a while I was into what my mind thinks of as Danish designs. Lateley it has been more towards Italian. The existence of indivual crasftsmen tends to blur those lines...which is a good thing.
Right, and, coming at it the other way, it would likewise be possible for someone to be a very serious collector, and not a smoker, with relatively few pipes. A guy might have 5 Ivarsson pipes, for instance, beatifully displayed, always on the lookout for a 6th, and never smoke.
^^^^This.
I tend to gravitate to specific carvers and brands but really don't care what country they are from. I really don't know how many pipes I have from specific countries, I could maybe create a spreadsheet though.
Yep, a lot of people have expressed that they don't care what country a pipe comes from, and that figures. I don't either.
I guess what I thought might be interesting was, for example, you don't give a darn about Denmark one way or the other, and just buy pipes that look good to you or have a good reputation as smokers or both, and you wind up with mostly Danish pipes. Or English. Or Italian. I thought that might say something about whether there were, in fact, national design schools where the pipes had enough in common frequently enough that it would be only natural that you would find more pipes that "looked good" to you from that country than from other countries. Sort of a chicken-egg thing.
That likely held true a century ago but in more recent times, regional design has crossed too many lines.
England
Italy
Denmark
Italy
Not a complete list, but…
American. 22
English. 12
Italian. 7
Danish. 6
Turkish. 4
Irish. 3
German. 2
French. 1
American. 22
English. 12
Italian. 7
Danish. 6
Turkish. 4
Irish. 3
German. 2
French. 1
Hah! For us Yankees, hard not to have only imported briar. AFAIK, there's no source of American briar. Someone show us that's wrong!
According to my favorite pipe seller(SP) this is my collect of 230 pipes by country.
It's pretty accurate.
It's pretty accurate.
Good illustrations! Yeah, I agree. The world's gotten a whole lot smaller and you can see at the press of a button what someone 10,000 miles away is up to, and get instructions on how to do it, to boot. Bound to result in more homogeneity. Seems to be reflected in the posts; some of us may have a few more English or Danish pipes than we have others, but mostly we seem to be (cue Jim McCay) spanning the globe.
Actually, immediately after WW2, Kaywoodie experimented with Manzanita, or "mission briar" that grew in California. As a connoisseur of Imported Briar, I have no experience with it, of course. Desperate people even make pipes out of vegetable waste like corn cobs and gourds, even. Or rocks they dig up. Only briar that's imported and proudly stated so on the shank for me. Do your "Dunhill" pipes use imported briar? No! Some vague kind of root is all they imprint. Don't get me started on soggy, boggy morta, so old it's practically fossilized. Also not imported. Hmpf.
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Kaywoodie started growing briar in California before the war and made a line with it. They were called Monterey Mission briar but were fairly unpopular and the line ended pdq. I don’t think the quality or age was sufficient for it to succeed or perhaps pipe smokers were a bit wary of anything new.
I have way too many to go through but I’d say overwhelmingly English although the older US pipes (particularly Kaywoodie) are catching up. After that I’d say French with a smattering of African and a couple of Danish. I don’t have many made this century and some of those were gifts as I prefer estates and older, classic designs although I did go through a period of buying System pipes from the mid/end of the last century.
I think most people tend to think maker or style before country of origin.
I think most people tend to think maker or style before country of origin.
9 - Denmark
6 - Italy
6 - USA (not counting a field of cobs)
5 - France
2 - Ireland
2 - England
1 - Germany
1 - Turkey
6 - Italy
6 - USA (not counting a field of cobs)
5 - France
2 - Ireland
2 - England
1 - Germany
1 - Turkey
