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PIPE DREAMS REFURBISHED ESTATE PIPES ARE COLLECTIBLE, TASTY--AND REFRESHINGLY UNHIP.
(FORTUNE Magazine)
By ALAN FARNHAM
March 3, 1997
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Haven't heard about the Pipe Craze? Don't worry; there isn't one. That's why pipes, unlike cigars, are still a good buy. Cigars used to be; but the Cigar Craze hit, and suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Harriet wanted a big fat stogie stuck between the lips. Prices exploded. Pipes, by contrast, have stayed blessedly unhip. What's more, they retain value: Put a match to a cigar, and an hour later what've you got? Ashes (and a fragrant memory). Put a match to your pipe, and an hour later you've got your pipe (and a memory equally as sweet).
You can, of course, spend lavishly on them (a new, top-of-the-line Dunhill might set you back $1,000), but there's no need to. Fifty dollars should get you one that smokes just fine. Spend more, and you'll surely get a pipe that's prettier--one with a silver band, let's say, or an especially handsome grain--but not one that necessarily smokes better. It's a little like buying a wristwatch: If you want to tell time, buy a Casio. If you want jewelry, buy a Cartier.
My own advice? Having happily smoked all manner of pipes--briars, clays, meerschaums, cherry-woods (plus probably a corncob or two)--and having served a brief postgraduate turn as a tobacconist, I recommend that you not buy a new pipe at all. Buy a used one.
If your response is "Ewwww! I'd rather wear somebody else's socks," keep reading. So-called estate pipes now are common, and for two good reasons. First, reconditioning techniques render them completely sanitary. Second, these pipes represent terrific bargains.
You can get a recent Dunhill that might originally have cost $300 for, say, $75 to $100. Older, rarer pipes, especially Dunhills from the 1920s and 1930s, have become highly collectible and are appreciating in value, as are a number of other prestige brands, including Comoy, Charatan, Ashton, Upshall, and Peterson. Such pipes can be bought, resold, or traded anytime, easily. It's a liquid market.
Assume that you pay $175 for a 1920s Dunhill. You can smoke this extremely fine and tasty pipe however long you want--a day, a month, a year, whatever--then, at your whim, unload it, often for more than you paid. When this happens, you find yourself in the same enviable position as the owner of a vintage Rolls or Bentley: The market, in effect, has paid you to enjoy your indulgence.
Hokey as this sounds, estate pipes give off an aura--one part nicotine, one part Shirley MacLaine. A man who smokes his dad's old briars likes to imagine the comfort they brought Dad between World War II bombing raids.
How to buy one? While more and more retailers carry estate pipes in addition to new pipes, the easiest and cheapest way to purchase them is by mail. Such operations as NML Pipes Direct in Lake Park, Florida, and Sherlock's Haven in San Francisco, periodically send their customers pictures and price lists of estate pipes (via mail or via Internet).
The customer can choose, usually, from among some 400 pieces; he then places an order and on delivery has a day or two to look over what he's bought. If he's unhappy with the pipes for any reason, he can return them (if he hasn't smoked them) for exchange or refund. With pipes both used and new, you often can tell much without ever having to strike a match: Point the bowl away from you and hold the pipe's mouthpiece between your thumb and forefinger; waggle the pipe to judge its weight. Seem a little heavy? That's not good. Sound craftsmanship (and fine wood) should produce a pipe that feels light for its size.
However much you spend for pipes, the tobacco is a bargain. It, too, can be bought by mail, from many of the same companies that sell discount cigars. J&R Tobacco in Statesville, North Carolina, for example, not only sells pipe tobacco at a discount, but will also provide, on request, a sheet describing the flavors and composition of most leading brands (a most helpful guide). Cornell & Diehl of Morganton, North Carolina, is another good supplier.
Even bought at retail, the best blends, such as those made by the McClelland Tobacco Co. of Kansas City, Missouri, seldom cost more than $10 per four-ounce tin. That may not sound like much tobacco, but it's enough to keep all but the greediest smoker happy for two weeks. Here's a cost comparison: Someone who smokes one premium cigar a day might well spend $1,500 a year on his habit. The same expenditure, applied to pipes, would buy five top-quality briars (which, properly cared for, last a lifetime) and enough tobacco for five years.
Any mere tallying of dimes and nickels, though, fails to comprehend pipe smoking's true value, which is aesthetic.
No other means of smoking affords so rich a sensory experience. Cigars, it's true, possess a variety of flavors--but only to the same extent that Whistler's palette had different shades of gray: The range is limited. Every cigar tastes more or less like every other cigar. With pipes, a whole world of flavors and aromas opens up--everything from straight, all-natural blends to tobaccos laced with bourbon, chocolate, apples, rum. Dunhill even makes blends keyed to time of day: On arising, there is Early Morning Pipe; on retiring, Nightcap. What's more, the same blend may taste different when smoked in different pipes, sometimes because of the wood (or other material) from which the pipe is made, sometimes from imponderables like the geometry of the bowl.
A customer wanting to express his individuality can instruct his tobacconist to create a blend unique to him. (Top that for exclusivity!) Or the smoker can easily customize a blend himself. As the short man down in Texas likes to say: It isn't rocket science.
Your author enjoys the flavor of cigars. So, of a Sunday, I took some cigar leaf and, when my wife wasn't looking, whirled it around in the kitchen food processor with a little burley and some Turkish. Voila! A robust, cigar-inspired smoke (and a wife left wondering why her cookies taste like Macanudos). It's like making beer in your basement.
Pipe smoking, even more than cigar smoking, lends itself to the acquisition of extremely cool and compelling stuff (okay, toys): pouches, tampers, lighters, pipe racks, reamers, travel cases, polishing cloths, restorative unguents, humidors, be-tassled smoking hats, Turkish slippers with toes that curl.
If you're getting the idea that pipes evoke romance, you're right. No other form of smoking has inspired a literature as vast, as whimsical, with titles that include: The Gentle Art of Smoking, by Alfred Dunhill; Sublime Tobacco, by Compton Mackenzie; and My Lady Nicotine, by J.M. Barrie. The latter, by the author of Peter Pan, boasts chapters titled "Matrimony and Smoking Compared" and "The Perils of Not Smoking."
Giants of the silver screen smoked pipes--Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Franchot Tone, the Coop--in part because pipes imply amiability, thoughtfulness, and other qualities attractive to women. Say what you will about women liking cigars, my own belief, based on close observation, is that only 17 in the United States actually do. The reason you think there're more is that those 17 have been photographed from different angles. A woman who when courting tells her fiance she thinks his cigar is wonderful will tell him, six months after marriage, to put it out. But pipes? Seldom a problem.
In fact, pipes have only one potential downside: death. Space here does not permit an extended discussion of the health-giving or -robbing properties of pipes. Suffice it to say they do present a potential hazard, though not one materially different from that presented by cigars. With each, moderation should be the smoker's watchword. Readers wanting to know more can request my informative pamphlet "Let's Smoke Right to Keep Fit" ($4.50).
If you're inclined to try a pipe, hurry up. Portents suggest a pipe renaissance (dare I say craze?) is coming, which could boost prices. Sales of pipes, still pathetically small compared with sales of cigars, are rising--for the first time in many years. Retailers report most of the new customers are early adopters and smokers fleeing the Cigar Craze.
Actor Pierce Brosnan looked great smoking a pipe throughout Mars Attacks! (Okay, so the picture was a dud; it put pipes back on the big screen.) A new magazine, Pipes and Tobaccos, is being published quarterly. And a gnawing question finally has been laid to rest: Where are tomorrow's pipe smokers coming from?
They're coming from colleges and universities. Pipe smoking clubs are springing up, including one at the University of Washington. The U.W. guys even have a Website, which links young pipe surfers to the home page of a man whom many regard as the greatest pipe smoker of all time (and, incidentally, the greatest recording artist of the 20th century): Bing Crosby. Like his friend, the soon-to-be-late Bob Hope, Crosby was a guy close with a dollar. Pipe smoking befitted his cost-conscious nature.
In one of life's crueler ironies, Crosby's pipes were auctioned off by his unsentimental widow shortly after the crooner dropped dead on a golf course in Spain in 1977. How he must be smiling now, knowing that part of Bing's Home Page is devoted to descriptions of his imperishable briars. Take heart, old friend! Your "boo-boo-boo" may no longer be a sound heard in the land; but the fragrance of your pipe smoke lingers, leading new generations on to romance and to thrift.
