Wither Hacker?

[Chasing Embers]

I hear the book "Ten Thousand Things About Piping You Always Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask" by ChasingEmbers is in the works!!

Place tobacco in pipe, light tobacco, smoke it. The End.

 

[olkofri]

Place tobacco in pipe, light tobacco, smoke it. The End.

Oh man, only one word longer than the shortest short story in the world: The Dinosaur! ?

 

[sablebrush52]

Hacker’s books were more widely mentioned 10-15 years ago. He deserves credit as a pioneer in providing some historical information and perspective on the pipe making trade, even though much of it was flawed. There are a lot more sources of information available today, more widely disseminated, than were available to Hacker, but even the available info of his era he sometimes got wrong.
Still, he provided a useful introduction to pipes for a lot of people. My gripe with his books was an expressed certitude that wasn’t earned. The phrases, “as far as I know”, “to the best of my knowledge” didn’t exist for him, and that is a serious flaw.
John Loring published a page on Hacker’s misinformation regarding Dunhill.
The field of scholarship has moved well beyond Hacker, but he did pioneering work.

 

[ssjones]

John Loring published a page on Hacker’s misinformation regarding Dunhill.
The field of scholarship has moved well beyond Hacker, but he did pioneering work.

Ah yes, that was what I remembered. Perhaps that tarnished his reputation in the industry enough that he moved on. A lack of confidence was not his problem. He seems to have traveled to every pipe event while he was active, there are a lot of signed books out there and photos indicate he was very active.

 

[mikestanley]

This thread is the first mention I've heard of him in a while, much like Fred Hanna or Carl Ehwa.



Much like Dunhill since they walked away from tobacco.

Well, Carl Ehwa has been gone since the mid 1970s but, I thank Dr. Fred Hanna every time I look at my remaining tins of Legends.

Mike S.

 

[anotherbob]

I have his The Ultimate Cigar Book. It's not so much about techniques as it is a survey on cigars, with a "directory" of brands and a description of their offerings which I've found rather useful. I made it a point to pull it out in front of a full class of students at the university and read it whilst I invigilated their final lab exam: my personal way of giving the finger to the university's head honchos on the very semester they declared the varsity "smoke free".

I wanted to get Hacker's book on pipes, but never got the chance.

my university says they're smoke free. But most buildings have ashtrays outside and people smoke all the time. Also my job is union and part of our contract states we're allowed to smoke outside. No one has said anything negative to me about my pipe smoking. I've gotten a few compliments on the smell or told the pipe is pimp (that one was yelled from a moving car.)

 

[jpberg]

Hacker was (is) a vanity project expert until crowd sourced reality catches up with him.
Like Jesse said, he gets points for doing it prior to major interwebs, but he constantly moves on to the next elite thing.

 

[greeneyes]

Our perception of facts naturally changes with time. The book was an important work to many, though it involved a good degree of opinion and conjecture upon matters that can't necessarily be regarded as timeless truths (nor, occasionally, factual for that matter). But it is a corpus of work whose publication involved researched and considerable effort. It has been edited and revised with contributions from his contemporaries in the pipe world. And it has already outlived, and will yet outlive many of us. Whether or not you agree with its content, in whole or in part, the fact stands that the book will continue to educate and to survive until long after threads like this one, and its countless predecessors, have long been lost to memory (if not to a search engine).

Put another way, if the "book of the future" is having to read recycled complaints about "Lakeland sauce" every week, then I pick the hardcover with a side of pipe show. I applaud anyone with the intellectual stamina to create a book on any subject, let alone pipes, at a time before Google made everyone an instant expert.

 

[jpberg]

Our perception of facts naturally changes with time. The book was an important work to many, though it involved a good degree of opinion and conjecture upon matters that can't necessarily be regarded as timeless truths (nor, occasionally, factual for that matter). But it is a corpus of work whose publication involved researched and considerable effort. It has been edited and revised with contributions from his contemporaries in the pipe world. And it has already outlived, and will yet outlive many of us. Whether or not you agree with its content, in whole or in part, the fact stands that the book will continue to educate and to survive until long after threads like this one, and its countless predecessors, have long been lost to memory (if not to a search engine).

Put another way, if the "book of the future" is having to read recycled complaints about "Lakeland sauce" every week, then I pick the hardcover with a side of pipe show. I applaud anyone with the intellectual stamina to create a book on any subject, let alone pipes, at a time before Google made everyone an instant expert.

Or, the internet proved him not to be an expert.
I’ve got no beef with the guy, but there were lots of things presented as facts that were just opinions, and lots of them were wrong.
So yeah, he put them them out there when no one else did, but that doesn’t make it real.
There’s an aura surrounding a few peoples names concerning pipes and tobacco that is okay, but not holy.

 

[sablebrush52]

Ah yes, that was what I remembered. Perhaps that tarnished his reputation in the industry enough that he moved on. A lack of confidence was not his problem. He seems to have traveled to every pipe event while he was active, there are a lot of signed books out there and photos indicate he was very active.

I suspect he signed most of his books. All of mine were signed when I bought them, many years before I ever attended a pipe show.

 

[sablebrush52]

Whether or not you agree with its content, in whole or in part, the fact stands that the book will continue to educate and to survive until long after threads like this one, and its countless predecessors, have long been lost to memory (if not to a search engine).

This is probably true and that is ineffably sad.

 

[jpberg]

It’s like the copy was for the Robb Report.
No one who owned a Rolls read it, but everyone who aspired to one took the mag as gospel.