New member, big on meerschaum, especially Turkish carvings; the antique ones in conventional briar shapes, I have a couple and that's enough, and the antique carvings are always miles beyond my budget. I hauled everything off the shelves and took some photos just now.
Here are my antique pipes: three bulldogs and an egg-in-hand. The WDC straight bulldog has a gold-lacquered sterling band with a silver swirl. The bent bulldog's sticker reads "Cecil - Finest Quality" and had a broken stem, which I got repaired with a sterling band. The egg/hand simply says "Warranted Real Meerschaum," has remnants of oxblood coloring, and has a replacement lucite mouthpiece that looks vaguely amber-ish.
Here are some Turkish faces. L to R: S. Yanik skull-in-skeleton-hand, bought when he first began listing on eBay, stunning of course; SMS Erdogan Bacchus, the best Turkish-carved Bacchus I have ever seen, with a genuinely jovial face, tiny teeth, and happy eyes and wrinkles; CAO Ismet Bekler poodle, no. 25 of 100, 1980, bought already smoked and coloring gently all over; unsigned but nice Sherlock Holmes, wearing a deerstalker and smoking a tiny meer pipe with a white wire stem; Martin Luther King, can't read the sig, one ear damaged; and a great (I suspect CAO or Golden Horn) elephant, one tusk tip missing.
Same pipes, cased. The elephant, Holmes and (unsmoked) King lack cases.
Lattices and one figural. I adore lattices, especially what I call 'true lattice' where the holes interconnect. The poker has an almost whole outer shell, open in a ring around top and bottom. The square/octagonal billiard is Murat and comes in a box case, having oval holes that connect at the sides. Front-and-center is an older SMS lattice, with a sliding top cover that has holes drilled so you can smoke it closed; the cover fits on with a delrin peg and can be removed. Lower left is an oval-lattice Mastercraft bent egg with a cultured amber stem, which I suspect is actually a Bauer; I've seen many Bauers of this style, and most Mastercraft meers I've seen were very plain. Between those is a huge, twisted freeform lattice, with one-half of its flying top buttress broken off (anyone know who could reattach it?) and it fits in the huge case at top, having only a handwritten "freeform lattice" label. Middle left was my first-ever cased meer, bought at age 19, a false-lattice egg by Paycok which still has that sweet 'new meer' smell! Last, top right, is an SMS rose-in-hand which should, in my opinion, be signed, but isn't; it has that subtle under-surface texture of top-notch meer, and is smooth as glass and beautifully-designed!
Here's a very, very long saxophone I bought second-hand but unsmoked. Powerful face with a big beaklike nose, under an amazing turban that really looks like wrapped fabric. Well-done beard, too, on par with the Erdogan Bacchus. Seven meer stem sections. Unsigned, no case, and the stem sections also have that under-surface translucent texture.
All taken apart, with a good shot of the stern, imperious face.
My three calabashes. The bigger two need new inserts and new cork. The bottom (carved) one was bought new from the Disneyland Tobacconist when I was nine, and came with a porcelain bowl. Top left is the pipe part of an unused Manx African pipe-carving kit. Also in the shot is an abstract Hayim Pinhas, two uncased figurals (lion, pegasus) bought from Tinder Box in the mid-1990s, and a quarter-bent Mediterranean-style (grapes and leaves).
The prizes of the collection: two Bekler abstract freehands. The top one came in that CAO box case, with a second shank extention of terribly low quality (stone and carving) which I set aside; it has three open sections, and 95% of the surface has a tiny stippled pattern of bored pinholes. It's signed 'ismet Bekler '74.' The other one is uncased and has two open loops; it's smooth, but with some random though extremely pretty flowery surface carvings, and it has the Golden Horn brass stem dot - like the CAO dot but with Golden Horn's logo, a blocky "G" with the center opening formed by a calabash pipe outline. These pipes are unbelievably cool, in my opinion.
Another handle of these two lovelies:
I'm always looking for information, catalogs, etc. from CAO and Golden Horn. I also collect Kirstens and Kirsten bowls, and antique and unusual corncobs. Being that they've got 'meerschaum' in the title, here are the three prize MMs: a Tibbe's No. 1, Tibbe's No. 100 sans reed stem, and a burnished Tibbe's No. 2 1/2! I'm always after more of these.
