I must admit to having a love/hate relationship with Peterson’s.
Back when I was starting out in the hobby they were much maligned, with terribly overpriced pipes that always seemed to have an inexcusable amount of pits, fills and other assorted niggles on pieces that were premium priced. And these are the pipes that still permeate the kinds of estate sales etc. that I get the bulk of my pipes from. So the vast majority of P pipes I see do not leave me impressed.
Then again, on the other end of the spectrum you have the absolutely rock-solid and collectors market which is getting stronger and more numerous by the day, raising prices on all those lovely old pieces, like the ones present in this thread, making me seriously doubt whether I’ll ever be able to spring for one. What’s worse, this hubbub seems to be inflating prices across the board on eBay, even for those same pitted nasty examples.
I have a couple of standard system pipes that I rarely use, a Kapet, and maybe on or two other that are nothing to write home about. To remain on-topic, here’s a modestly nice Peterson’s Kinsale XL12:
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I do however have one Peterson’s pipe that I do enjoy very much and would never part with:
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There’s an anecdote about this one. I’d bought it an age ago, for something like $10 from a guy as a
(briar)wood pipe. Since it was completely black back then, and had a fine even cake in the bowl, and I was a young smoker at the time, I hadn’t questioned it. I did notice that it had kind of a strange faux army mount and a really interesting rustification pattern, but again, it just
didn’t click. Fortunately I didn’t find the need to treat this particular pipe with salt and alcohol, otherwise there’d probably be no pipe nor this story.
I very quickly understood that this particular pipe smoked by far the best from most all the pipes I owned at the time, and this held true with all my Pete’s I’d subsequently purchased, with this black one outclassing them all. This is still the best Pete I have by far. Some years later, I’m sitting with a friend telling him about this pipe and extolling its virtues, he takes one look at it and says – you do realise this is a meer pipe? I of course refused to believe it, after all I’d had it for years... and it wasn’t until he said something along the lines of – well how bout you remove the cake and if it’s meer let me have it – that I realised he was dead serious.
Of course, cake was reamed, meer revealed, alongside my stupidity. In the time since the black finish has started to fade in places making it perfectly obvious. I do joke around with this story and remark that the friend in that conversation practically gave me a new pipe I’d never known I had.
I realise it seems quite silly from this vantage point, but hey, maybe you get a chuckle out of it.
