Welcome!
This is the Hub for the PipeTrader Blog world. From here you will see all the latest postings generated by our members. If you are interested in getting a blog set up on this site, please contact us here for more information on getting blog enabled! If you do request a blog, please make sure that you've read and agree to the Rules that we will be enforcing in this community.
Please contact us at here with any errors, problems, and/or questions.
Latest Posts
Now that there isn’t a Republican in the white house to kill it, Congressional Democrats claim to be making SCHIP a Top Priority. CQ Politcs reported on Friday, November 6th that Democrats in the US Congress plant to move quickly in the New Year to pass a major expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was interviewed on National Public Radio the day after the election and stated that the expansion of SCHIP “will probably be one of the first bills we would put on President Obama’s desk.”
For those who recall recent events, the US Senate and House both passed a $35 billion dollar SCHIP expansion bill TWICE but it was vetoed both times by President Bush and the legislative branch was unable to swing enough votes to over-ride the veto both times.
What Does This Mean To You?
Why is this important to pipe and cigar smokers you may ask? Well, because this bill would be funded almost exclusively on the backs (and out of the pocketbooks) of smokers of ALL types.
| Tobacco Prouct | Current Tax Rates | SCHIP Tax Rates | Percentage Tax Increase |
| Cigars | 20.719% of manufacturer’s price; capped at 4.875 cents per cigar | 33% of manufacturer’s price; cap of $3.00/cigar | 6,000% |
| Little Cigars | 4 cents per pack | $1.00 per pack | 2,197% |
| Pipe Tobacco | $1.0969 per pound | $2.8126 per pound | 156.4% |
But that isn’t all, the CQ Politics article points out that the tax increase shown above won’t even cover the cost of the expansion of this program. In fact, the congressional Budget Office issued a report in August of this year which found that a five year expansion of the SCHIP program as envisioned by the House and the Senate will cost close to $45 billion, not the $35 billion they are hoping to raise.
The current SCHIP program is set to expire on March 30, 2009 so they are going to move fast on this. We responsible smokers need to speak out loud and clear that this funding proposal is not only unfair, it is UNSOUND!. Not only will it not fund what they want it to do, thereby continuing to grow our budget deficit even further but it also unfairly targets a small percentage (less than 10%) of the US population to pay for something that they claim is a universal need.
Not only will this hit YOU directly in the wallet in these trying times, but it will likely cause for the closure of many tobacconists around the country that are barely hanging on as it is. This, in turn, will dramatically affect the volume of cigars purchased yearly, decreasing the amount of money raised by this tax increase as demand drops; widening the difference between the funds committed to fund SCHIP and the funds available to pay for it.
And if we look out beyond our own selfish needs, IPCPR and many other organizations predict dire results for the economies of the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras as a result of this flawed legislation.
What Can I Do To Help?
Well, we all need to band together and show our elected officials the errors of their thinking in this flawed bill.
Let your US Senator and representative in the House know how the negative impact of this legislation will affect you, affect small businesses in your community and how you feel it will affect our neighbors in cigar producing countries. Make sure that you reference SCHIP in your conversation and how you are rallying your neighbors and fellow business owners to defeat unfair taxation. You should also remind them that as a voting block in their state/district, you WILL remember those that fall prey to the “but it’s for the children” sound-bite mentality behind those supporting this bill.
Helpful Links:
A listing of all the current Senators
How to find your local Representative
Your IMMEDIATE action is the only thing that will keep this proposal from becoming a LAW! Please respond today!
As always, we encourage your responses in the comments section below.
Note: What follows is the third part of an interview conducted by Gordon Beecher with Jerry B.P. Riggs about the upcoming release of Sherlock Holmes: Return to the Musgrave Ritual. But first, a quick correction:
In my previous interview installment #2, I had mentioned The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes had first come out in an 1892 edition. But I had wrongly deduced, casting back with a faulty memory on that year in the 1936 edition’s copyright page, that 1892 was evidence of an earlier edition of The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes by Harper & Brothers. Mr Randall Stock very kindly wrote to me, asking whether such an edition actually existed, or that perhaps the year 1892 referred to the publication date of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A quick follow-up of his suggestion proved him right. Thanks for setting the record straight, Randall!
G.B. I have read and enjoyed your draft you’ve given me of your upcoming Sherlock Holmes book. It’s my opinion that Sherlock fans, or anyone who likes a good detective story, will enjoy it at least as much as The Unusual Sherlock Holmes—your presently published book. But tell us about your sequel in your own words.
Riggs Its title is Sherlock Holmes: Return to the Musgrave Ritual. It had about three different working titles, but after going through the usual metamorphoses a book takes, this became the final title. And instead of being another collection of novellas, this contains a single novel. The setting for the story is in Holmes’s retirement years to the South Downs of East Sussex. But it begins with a brief entrée, confiding to the reader a secret betrayal against its narrator: crucial to the investigation that will follow, known to none of the characters in the unfolding of the plot. Then the lead in to the story is a sort of autobiographical prologue, of my meeting in 1964 with a suspiciously Holmesian-looking old English gentleman who senses a personal crisis in my life, and offers direction to me in the form of the tale that follows. 
This tale begins with Holmes receiving a sort of peace offering from Mark Twain—a corncob pipe—for his poking fun at Holmes in his Double Barreled Detective Story. The corncob pipe becomes a third favorite pipe, along with Holmes’s disputatious cherry wood and his consoling black clay, and causes him to think more and more about making a home in the country. Not really to retire from active detective work, but to appear to retire, while actually only removing his base of operations from London (which, he says, has become a singularly uninteresting place for him since the death of his late arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty). Holmes has realized that more and more of his cases, since his return from his hiatus in the aftermath of Moriarty’s death, have taken him away from London to rural settings. In Doyle’s Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Holmes had noted to Dr. Watson that there is a greater potential for sin and vice to go undetected and unchecked in the smiling and beautiful countryside than in the vilest alleys of London. This then becomes his new theatre of operations, and Holmes and Watson (who has at this point gotten married again) go their separate ways. —— Holmes no sooner settles down into his villa overlooking the Channel, when he’s recruited by a handful of boys from the nearby village of Fulworth to be the referee for their playing a series of games described in Colonel Baden-Powell’s army manual, Aids to Scouting for NCOs and Men. The games in that manual had originally been meant to serve as exercises for cavalry troopers training in scouting and intelligence work. The skills in it included some backwoods skills, but most especially the methods for training in observation and deduction. Baden-Powell called the latter of these skills ‘Sherlocking’ or ‘Sherlock Holmesism’. But that army handbook became a craze-sensation among the British civilian population. Clubs of s and boys sprung up all over Britain to play the games in the book and take the challenge to attain the same caliber of expertise as elite trained scouts. But while at first these amateur enthusiasts were content to do it for the fun of it, as they got good at the skills described in the manual, they felt they were deserving of a badge similar to the one the soldier scouts wore: a fleur-di-lis badge, specially designed by Baden-Powell. Few soldiers in the British army could earn the privilege to wear the badge. No deserving civilian would be allowed to wear that regulation badge. So each Scout club would design a makeshift fleur-di-lis of their own, or order one from the jewelers’. Either way, it would have been more than a club of boy enthusiasts could afford. So in recruiting an to referee them, they had tricked him into sponsoring them, as well, at the very least for the cost of having some crude sheet metal fleur-di-lis badge cut out by a tinsmith.
G.B. Was this something that actually occurred at that time—this grassroots movement of English scout-clubbers?
Riggs Oh yes. And beginning just a little before the time Doyle had written Holmes into retirement, until B-P officially started the Boy Scout movement. Some of these clubs were comprised of s in a sort of sporting social club. Others were made up of boys, and some s, too. The craze was so widespread; there would have been at least one club within hail of Holmes’s cottage. And one of the assignments in the Aids to Scouting manual was that Scouts should seek instruction from detectives in the investigation of clues. Not only would it have been perfectly logical that such a club of local boys would have approached Holmes to referee them; it would have been impossible if they hadn’t.
G.B. Very interesting. So, in your Return to the Musgrave Ritual, this local club of boys tricks Sherlock Holmes into sponsoring them for a badge?
Riggs Certainly not! Instead, Holmes takes a look at their copy of the army manual, just to see what he’s getting into. He notices that the principal skill in the book is tracking, observation, and deduction–nicknamed ‘Sherlocking’ by Baden-Powell. Then and there, Holmes not only consents to be their referee, he insists on designing the fleur-di-lis for them to earn, which has his own likeness framed inside the outline of the badge, and bears a scroll underneath it with the acronym: S.H.E.R.L.O.C.K. (standing for See, Hear, Examine, Read, Learn, Observe, Conclude, and Know—and central to all these are ‘Read and Learn’). As it turns out, the trick is turned back onto the boys, when he renames their club from The Fulworth Boys’ Scouting Club, to The Fulworth Boys’ Sherlockian Scouts—turning them into his Sussex irregular detective force: to serve him as his eyes and ears in the country, as his Baker Street Irregulars had done for him in the city.
G.B I am honored to be wearing one of your Sherlockian Scout pins at this time. You have taken the design for that Sherlockian Scout badge described in your book, which Holmes is said to have conceived for this club of local boys. Not only that, this pin will figure repeatedly as an object of some interest in the unfolding plot of your upcoming book. Personally, it gives me a thrill after reading the story, to see and hold onto one of the actual badges, as it were. And the legend card that accompanies it is a nice touch.
Riggs I like to think people enjoy a sort of twin hold on the abstract and the tangible. It serves as a point of contact with the story—engrafting imagination to the roots of history. Imaginative thinking is the domain of a reasoning detective like Sherlock Holmes, who thrills at the tales that tangible little clues can tell. I hope that for readers of Sherlock Holmes: Return to the Musgrave Ritual–when it comes out, soon–will enjoy a kind of virtual reality experience: with the book to excite their imaginations, along with this pin to add a physical sensation of being transported to that place and time with the characters in the story. But the Sherlockian Scout badge is a tangible tribute to the hundreds of those other makeshift fleur-di-lis badges of actual clubs that had existed then, and that had answered the demand for a Scouting program, for years before it ever became a reality in the movement we know it as today. This is just part of what the Sherlockian Scout badge commemorates. It’s also a reminder that from the start, Sherlocking was as fundamental an institution to the Scout training program as backwoodsmanship; that at heart, a true Sherlockian is really at least half a Scout, and a truly complete Scout should be a Sherlockian.
G.B. What would the Sherlockian scholar/critics think about that—or come to think of it, Scouts and Scouters?
Riggs I would hope they’d take it as a compliment, just as much as for the readers of all ages and all levels of intelligence who’ve enjoyed what I’ve written, whether they had ever been Scouts or not. But there can’t be any getting around the ties Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Doyle, had to Scouting, or Sherlocking’s value as at least a life enriching hobby, if not an essential skill. The skills of observation and deduction as Holmes had first begun to practice them, had been considered by him to be the merest hobby before he ever saw in them a way to make a living for himself, as we read in his ‘Gloria Scott’ story. At the time that story took place, he was believed to be no more than twenty. So how long before that had he begun to dabble in that ‘hobby’ that was destined to be named for him: at the age of twelve, perhaps, or younger, maybe? That would have been just about the same time the founder of Boy Scouts was hiding out in the woods from his schoolmasters, training himself in his Scout skills as well. Like Holmes, Baden-Powell had little foreseen where those forays into the woods would take him in a career as an army Scout, and the training of men and boys. But Sherlocking as a course of instruction, as with all the other Scout skills, had originally been meant to train soldiers. And years later, after B-P’s adaptation of the Scout training program for boys, he recommended the Boy Scout handbook he’d written to army instructors, as being more fully detailed in tracking, observation, deduction, and related subjects (Sherlocking) than the program he’d first written for the army! See how far that hobby can take you? My program to re-implement Sherlocking—first as campfire yarns, then into print—had been adapted from both the programs B-P had made: both of them applicable to not only men and boys, but to women, too.
G.B. Yes. I remember reading in your Return to the Musgrave Ritual manuscript that Baden-Powell’s Aids to Scouting army manual was a textbook in an English school for governesses.
Riggs Charlotte Mason’s Training College in Ambleside.
G.B. And it’s to this remote locale in the North Country that a love interest for Sherlock Holmes, in your book, makes her exit in the aftermath of their first meeting.
Riggs Maud Bellamy, that’s right.
G.B. Why her, and not Irene Adler?
Riggs It was Carolyn Senter of Classic Specialties in Cincinnati who got me thinking about that. Her perspectives about the women in the Holmes canon, and how they were affected by the situations in the stories in the time they lived, have always made me give a second look to what I’d read there before. At her suggestion, I looked into the case for Maud Bellamy, and haven’t been able to think of anyone else for Holmes, since. And I could easily see why Holmes wouldn’t think of anybody else, either. Sure, Holmes had some glowing words for Irene Adler. But it was Watson (the romantic) who wrote his impressions of what he thought he saw in that encounter in A Scandal in Bohemia. It was Holmes who described in his own words, his reaction to Maud Bellamy in The Lion’s Mane, betraying his feelings for her, and when he’d observed that no young man could have crossed her path unscathed, he may have been identifying an emotion within him, which no other woman had stirred in him in his younger days. And that may have been the reason he had been by his own admission, ‘culpably slow’ in his solving of that case, surrounding the cause of the death of Maud’s fiancé. On his visit to her at her father’s house in the course of his investigation, Holmes remarked that Miss Bellamy seemed to already know him on sight, though they had never apparently seen one another before (or had she taken notice of him before that?). Then her composed concentration on hearing the details of her fiancé’s death mirrored a rare strength of character she shared with Holmes, and in her offer of her sympathy and help to him in his solving of that tragedy, without asking any sympathy or help for herself, there may have been potential for a partnership of soul mates in the discovery of future mysteries. But she still needed some time to sort out her own feelings and to arrive at a strategy to win him over, and in her absence from the scene, wished to see whether Holmes would miss her.
G.B. Meanwhile, Holmes accepts an invitation to Brownsea Island to observe the experimental camp Baden-Powell held there to see whether his scheme for Boy Scouting as a national movement would take hold.
Riggs Yes. This would have been a rare honor, seeing that B-P had invited no other outsiders to the camp, other than an agent for his publisher who was to show up at the end of the camp to learn how it had succeeded, and decide whether to put the Scouting for Boys handbook into print. Brownsea was a privately owned island, and for that reason had been B-P’s choice of a site to conduct this social experiment, mixing different classes of boys to see how they got along with each other: away from the prying eyes of press reporters. For Holmes, it looked like a chance for a vacation, mere days after his investigation in the mystery of The Lion’s Mane, and to have some time for himself to sort out the more disturbing problem of a woman creeping into his life (and to decide whether he wanted her there). There on the island a very old man, who seems to have been too stubborn to die when he was supposed to, latches onto Holmes, and charges him with not having closed the case of The Musgrave Ritual, nearly thirty years before. Holmes regards what looks like the old man’s series of flights of fancy, as mildly amusing, then tiresome. He gives him an ultimatum to prove his claims, or leave him alone. When Holmes rings up his old friend Musgrave at Hurlstone, thinking to share a laugh with him over the old man’s antics, he discovers there was at least an element of truth to what he’d had to say. There are still four missing pieces to the Stuart’s crown, hidden somewhere on Brownsea Island, and they are not the only ones looking for them. Along the way there is an old murder to solve, a would-be murderer lurking in the woods, and unexplained cries in the night.
G.B. That seems a fair synopsis of the story, which should whet the appetites of readers, and send them clamoring for their copy of your book when it comes out. Its twists and turns carry you along from one surprise to another, even when the story seems to be just at an end. And with the main mystery concluded, there returns the mystery of what happens between Holmes and Maud Bellamy. But you plant enough clues to suggest that something does.
Riggs Something does, but I’m not going to have them get all soppy with each other. Holmes is something different to Maud from the warm admirers, more her age, who’ve always hung around her before this. And she’s a cleverer sort of woman than to think she can fan passion’s flame in him, or that he’d respond to her falling into his arms. She’d hope he would, but she’s not going to hold her breath. The young men suitors of her family’s class that her father would have had her go with don’t suit her. The kind of man she had hoped to marry, the late Fitzroy McPherson, was more her type: a man of learning. But it was as much out of fear for her father as for being disinherited by his uncle, that Fitzroy had not dared to court her openly. Holmes was a man she could appreciate even more: cultured and learned, and unafraid to look her father in the eye. And it’s these same qualities he has already seen in her, so that he may see in her a rare kindred spirit over time. What she’d first set out to do in the story in my book, to establish herself as an institution in his life, has been achieved in the end, when in her four months’ absence from Fulworth, Holmes lays aside his country pipe for his disputatious cherry wood, and on her return, he returns to his companionable country pipe and looks forward to her frequent visits in the pretense of only assisting his housekeeper. But at the end of his birthday dinner, with the gift of a grand, new pipe with the Sherlockian badge mounted on its front, he accepts Maud’s re-rendering of the meaning of the letters on its scroll: it’s his acceptance of her new role in his life. His surprise to her a little before in giving her one of these badges, and her vow to wear it forever, may have been the nearest thing to a betrothal made between them, regardless of his objections against any such thing. And when she brings the tobacco slipper to the table and sets it at his place, she has established herself as the lady of the house.
G.B. Not to mention her motherliness towards the Fulworth Sherlockian Scouts seated around them at the table. Do I hear wedding bells?
Riggs It would be a very closed-door affair. I’ll see if I can wangle a couple invitations.
G.B. All right. I enjoyed your use of symbolism in the fleurs-di-lis and pipes, and other things, to tell their own story of the ideals and feelings of the characters in your book, and their relationships to each other and the conflicts going on around them. Are they the extension of the Sherlockian use of observing signs and deducing their meanings that Holmes and B-P’s Scouts were instructed in?
Riggs Oh, good! I’m glad you noticed that!
G.B. I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. Then what about any negativity in your use of pipe smoking in your books, particularly from parents or Scout leaders of young people who might read them?
Riggs The pipe as a symbol has always been an extremely positive thing, and still is. That’s not to say there haven’t always been its negative critics who’ll only look at it and think ‘smoking’, and wrongly attribute to it a weakness of character and lack of moral fiber. But there’s generally always been a difference in people’s minds between a man or woman sucking down a pack or two a day of cigarettes, and the man who puffs serenely at his pipe. In Doyle’s canon of stories, Holmes smoked a pipe, and just as often he smoked cigarettes, too. But the universal image of Holmes is of him holding some kind of pipe. Mention the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’, and everyone automatically pictures him in profile with a pipe, not with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. It is a more easily accepted image of him, even in the mind of the non-smoker or that of the cigarette smoker. Baden-Powell had smoked a pipe a couple of times in his life: once as a young subaltern in the army; but he had given it up when he couldn’t afford his tobacco. Later, his colonel ordered him to take it up again in the jungle campaign in the Gold Coast. It was believed then that smoking a mixture of tobacco and eucalyptus leaves warded off malaria. But the combination of the eucalyptus, and the humidity causing his tobacco to turn moldy, made him so sick that he gave it up and never smoked again. Thereafter his stand on smoking was not so strong against it, except that he said it was better for the sense of smell for a Scout not to smoke. But he also cited some advantages for an army Scout to keep a pipe handy with his secret papers packed inside the bowl with a fill of tobacco for him to light, in case the enemy should stop and search him. But he roundly condemned cigarette smoking, which he regarded as ‘effeminate’, as well as being a filthy habit; and at the same time sought the return of Britain’s reputation of its stolid, pipe-sucking manhood. Several of his illustrations of outdoorsmen, and even of Scout leaders, depicted them smoking a pipe. Even through the 1960’s in American Scouting, the presence of pipe smoking men in their official publications portrayed a positive image for boys to look up to. In contrast to Freud’s saying that ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’—a pipe is never just a pipe. From the first it had been meant to represent peaceful council with oneself and others, relaxation by the hearth or the campfire, and focus of the mind and spirit: positive qualities not often found anywhere else in the world today.
G.B. Well said! Thank you, Jerry, for having me over to talk with you again. A lot of people, I know, are waiting anxiously for your new book to come out. That is Sherlock Holmes: Return to the Musgrave Ritual, Infinity Publishing.com. When, about, will it be released?
Riggs Either around time for Christmas, or early next year [2009].
G.B. But shoppers can order your first book, The Unusual Sherlock Holmes now, either through most bookstores, or Amazon.com, or direct from your publisher online: www.buybooksontheweb.com (or call toll free: 877-BUY-BOOK). They can also get their autographed copy from you by check or money order?
Riggs Yes, for $18.95 + $5.00 S&H. Michigan residents need to include $1.14 tax; made out to Jerry Riggs, here at 303 S. Norton St., Corunna, MI 48817.
G.B. And don’t forget about the Sherlockian Scout badge.
Riggs That’s right, available only through me. They’re $4.95 each + $2.25 S&H, and Michigan residents add 30¢ tax.
G.B. And the Sherlock Holmes: Return to the Musgrave Ritual book, when that comes out, will be available from these same locations?
Riggs It will. And if you order more than one book from me, it’s for the total cost of the books, with the onetime $5.00 S&H fee.
G.B. And what do you expect will be the cost of the Return to the Musgrave Ritual book?
Riggs That could be subject to change. $15.95 was the projected price. But as soon as it’s released, I’ll have a more definite figure.
I found these pipe tips on the Bucharest Pipe Club's blog. I found them interesting and figured why not re-purpose them. Warning, much of the site is NOT in English so be forewarned if that type of thing bothers you...
Keeping Your Pipe Stems Shining Like New
First, we have to give credit where credit is due. This tip comes from the video "Total Pipe Care and Maintenance". We've all had our vulcanite rubber stems turn that nasty brown/green that happens over time. This is oxidization. Oxidization comes from the chemical reaction from the saliva in our mouths reacting with the vulcanite and from sunlight. This unsightly process can be slowed with a simple product that you most likely already have in your kitchen ... olive oil. This process is best done with a brand new stem or a stem that has been thoroughly cleaned. First, take the stem from the bowl. With your finger take a very small amount of olive oil and coat the outside surface of the stem. Allow the olive oil to penetrate for about 5 - 10 minutes. Now take a clean cotton rag and wipe off the excess. It's that simple! Here's why it works ......... If you look at a vulcanite stem under magnification you'd see that there are thousands, if not millions, of tiny pits in the surface, similar to an english muffin. This is normal. By applying the olive oil to the stem the microscopic pits get filled by the oil leaving less surface area on the stem for the oxidation to get a foot hold. You'll also want to keep your pipe out of sunlight, direct or otherwise, for any extended period of time.
The above tip is a great idea. However, I found the results of the following experiment quite interesting:
Leave It In or Pull It Out ?
Your pipe cleaner that is. One year ago someone emailed and asked whether or not it was a good idea to leave a pipe cleaner in the stem when you're through smoking. I answered according to what I had been taught ... NO. I've always listened to the pros and cons on the subject and formulated my own conclusion. After thinking about I came a the conclusion that I shouldn't be jumping to that conclusion. I decided to perform a somewhat controlled test. Here is how I did it.
-Two identical, new Savinelli Model 114 pipes were used. Both croos grained.
-Each was smoked three times a week for 1 year (3/03)
-Each rested 2 days between smoking.
-Each was cleaned with 4 pipe cleaners after smoking was complete.
-Each was thoroughly cleaned every 4 weeks.
-The same tobacco, Five Star Deluxe, was smoked exclusively.
-One was left to rest with a pipe cleaner in the stem and shank and one was not.
-Standard size and fluff pipe cleaners were used.
Here are my observations at the conclusion of the test. The pipe in which the cleaner was left in will be referred to as Pipe A. Pipe B is the pipe without.
-The shank of Pipe A is slightly darker than Pipe B leaving a slightly two toned appearance.
-Pipe A developed a slight gap between the shank and stem.
-Pipe A's shank expanded slightly larger than the stem.
-Pipe A had more pipe cleaner residue (stray fuzz) in it when thoroughly cleaned.
-Pipe B took longer to break in. I'm not sure if that had anything to do with the test.
-Pipe A took a few more cleaners for the once a month cleaning.
-After 1 year Pipe A is a little more ... well for lack of a better term, stinky.
So there you have it.
Pipe B, without the cleaner, faired better than Pipe A with. I am only going to guess why but I suspect that the pipe cleaner left in does more to keep the moisture trapped than it does to wick it out...Happy Smoking
Every wonder how the most successful and most reliable lighters of all time are made? Check out this video?
Every wonder how clay pipes are made? Check out this video of an interview with someone claiming to be the last clay pipe maker in Gouda, Holland at his retirement:
Even though this is a Youtube video, I first found this on the excellent Marcin's pipes and tobaccos blog. Of course, we carry clay pipes too at the barn. http://www.tobacco-barn.com/p-8167-goedewaagen-clay-churchwarden.aspx
Mother Earth News has published an article on their web site called How About a Corncob Pipe. This particular article is really nothing new; it is a reprint of an article that originally appeared in a Peace Corp Volunteer Publication. The spin on the article is that if you can't stop smoking, then save money and smoke a pipe. However, their approach to making a corncob is not for the faint of heart or the clumsy of knife.
If you like to do things the hard way, you can use the small blade of your knife for this job . . . though it'll take you a while to dig through the corncob wall like that, and you're quite likely to end up with a hole in the wrong place when the knife snaps shut on your finger.
If all this seems to be too much work for you, check out our corncob pipes. We carry the best from Missouri Meerschaum. Right now, it appears the only ones we have on the site are the top of the line, Country Gentleman (shown at left). Hopefully tonight I'll get some more up on the site. We've got a couple of other different grades of corncob pipes including the Mac, General McArthur style!
As for taking up a pipe to help you stop smoking those nasty cigarettes... I can't think of anything better! And don't worry about the negatives they say about store-bought pipes. They don't use those nasty metal filters any more. Most, if not all, the Missouri Meerschaum pipes use industry standard Medico pipe filters for cool clean smokes!
Anyway, let us know how you feel about this. Leave us a comment down below!
One of the nice things about running MeershcaumPipes.com website has to be all the questions that come in about people's meerchaum pipes. I thought it would be worthwhile to start documenting some of these, if nothing else, because we get some cool pictures of pipes to evaluate. Take this one for example (yes, she gave us permission to repost this thread):
-----Original Message-----
From: Susan C
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 6:44 PM
Subject: Question from MeerschaumPipes.com Website
I have an old Meerschaum pipe carved with a horse running across a few
logs and branches. The pipe is richly colored but not just in shades,
the back of the horse has a spotted area which has remained white.
And there are a few other "spots" of white clearly intentionally
placed. The surface shows no signs of inlay...so ...where these areas
treated with something to prevent them from coloring???
Our reply was:
Wow,
What a great old piece that is!
As for your questions on the coloration, yes, it is very natural for a heavily used meerschaum pipe to turn this color over time. Other examples and an explanation of the process can be found at http://meerschaumpipes.com/ColorYourMeerschaum.aspx
The variations that you see in the pipe itself (what you are referring to as brindle coloration) is caused by the stone itself as well as whatever was used to seal it at the time. For the last half of the 20th century, bees wax mixed with paraffin has been the preferred sealant. I'm guessing at the age of your piece that perhaps they were still using sperm whale oil for this but it is hard to tell from the photos.
The sealant acts to protect the exterior of the pipe and also to help "draw" the liquids and toxins out through the stone depositing color on the outer layer of the pipe. What is particularly interesting about this example is the "mottled" look on the horse's back. The lighter color on the nose and ears is probably the result of extended rubbing on the inside of the case; the back appears to be a different story. It is almost like the carver had placed a blocking sealant of some sort on portions of its back to give it the effect of an Appaloosa with a small blanket on it. The blocking sealant would prevent the color of the tobacco from seeping through those areas. From the looks of it, I would guess this was intentional rather than a happy accident.
If this was a pipe that you wished to keep for it's sentimental and artistic values, it could most likely be cleaned up to get rid of much (but not all) of the tobacco smell. After a really good cleaning and allowing it to sit out for a period of time, the majority of the objectionable aroma should be gone. At that point, you could probably mount it inside a sealed shadow box and have a great decorative piece for a horse lover.
If you were looking to sell it, I would suggest that you place it online on PipeTrader.com as well as Ebay to find a buyer. We could also sell this on consignment for you in our Estate Pipes section of the Tobacco-Barn.com website.Antique meerschaum pipes rarely get high dollar values from anyone but one who collects them for artistic purposes rather than for smoking them.
We wish you the best of luck with your pipe and want to thank you for sharing these photos with us.
I stumbled upon this piece titled "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" by Steve Johnson of the Southwest Pipe & Cigar League just the other day while working on plans for their next meeting there at the Barn.
Reading it brought back some great memories of the various trips to London that I'd had with one of my previous employers. His words brought back mental images of many of the locations he mentions.
The only downside for me was that I wasn't a pipe smoker then AND I didn't have such a great roadmap of tobacconists in London. I frequented the Seegar and Snuff shop in Covent Gardens most of the time I was there. I never got down to the Dunhill shop he mentions during business hours.
Oh well, perhaps if the Dollar ever goes back up against the Pound or the Euro, I'll be able to afford another trip back... If I do, I'll have this as a guide.
Links mentioned in Steve's article:
Interesting thread about meerschaum pipes on a non-pipe forum over at the Straight Razor Place.
The posting by mparker762 showing off a couple of his best colored pipes includes the darkened claw shown at right.
In a subsequent posting, he extols the virtues of using a coloring bowl:
As for coloring, a coloring bowl like the one shown with the Cavalier is really the secret. I've got three coloring bowls, a smooth meer, a pebbled meer (shown w/ Cavalier), and an XL briar coloring bowl made for me by Mike Butera after much hounding. AFAIK it's the only one in existence, and I use it for smoking my english tobaccos in my meerschaums.
With results like these, it is hard to argue with the man. One thing that I found particularly interesting was that the claws darkened up so much more so than the bowl. I would have imagined this to be the case with the shank but seems odd to me that the talons on the claw would be so dark given the path coloring must travel to reach that portion of the stone.
Anyone else have any great coloration samples to share? You've seen, mine, now show me yours!
This blog posting on JackTales blog brought this new pipe wax to my attention. I've never heard of Paragon Wax for the Pipe before but his tales of using this product to rehabilitate meerschaum as well as briar pipes really caught my attention.
I’ve applied numerous coats to my meerschaum and the finish has improved each time. And I might be wrong, but the coloration process looks like it’s accelerated a little. Maybe in drying, the glaze pulled the nicotine outwards. I don’t know, but like I said, knowing the complete disaster I had started with, I’ve been amazed with the results.
I've ordered a "combo set" to see how this works. I'll let drop a note here when I've had a chance to try this on a few different pipes. If I'm happy with the results, we'll see about getting this product available to sell at the Barn.
Newsbiscuit.com is reporting in this posting that a recent British statistical survey has shown that for the first time in the history of these studies, the usage of Crack Pipes is not outpacing the usage of Tobacco Pipes!
The end of the civilized world is near! Of course the survey resorts to rash generalizations about the type of person who smokes a tobacco pipe:
Old fashioned pipes are still popular with certain types of older bearded men; model railway enthusiasts, canal barge restorers and the like, but curiously these tend to be among the least likely people to head into the inner cities to score crack cocaine off their dealer.
We've actually been finding at the Barn that more and more younger, college age men (and women) are not succumbing to the lure of the glass pipe but are coming in and learning the finer points of Briar and Meerschaum!
Ann Widdecombe, a Minister of Parliment, has used this to decry something that we've been passionate about all along. This is just another example of political correctness run amuk: government is too busy cracking down LEGAL smoking of tobacco products like pipes and cigars when they should be working harder to address issues revolving around the sale, acquisition and use of crack and other illegal drugs. Finally a politician that "gets it!"
‘IN GOOD COMPANY WITH CONAN DOYLE, AND SHERLOCK HOLMES, TOO’
AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY ‘B-P’ RIGGS:
AUTHOR OF THE UNUSUAL SHERLOCK HOLMES-
Some Holmes ‘scholars’ make the same criticism for the contents of this new collection of Holmes novellas that have been made against the original canon of Holmes stories by A. Conan Doyle for years. But are they just for kids, or is their subject matter ‘ ’? “They were written for everybody to enjoy, just as Doyle’s original Holmes stories had been,” the author says, and readers, young and old alike, agree. Riggs answers his detractors’ criticisms and clarifies some of their inaccuracies in their synopses of his stories in this exclusive interview.
Interviewed by Gordon Beecher, editor for The Norton Street Acrostic.
Part Two
G.B. So what about one review that says your book was written at the level of pre-teen boys, or the young at heart, or anyone else who’s willing to suspend disbelief?
Riggs The suspension of disbelief was a discipline that Sherlock Holmes practiced all his life, to follow the great guiding principle of his profession: that in the elimination of all that was impossible, the one possibility that remained – however improbable – must be the truth. Such a possibility demands a willful suspension of disbelief. If a person possessed that quality alone, then he was Holmes’s man, even if that man was a boy. So, while it’s true that I created my Holmes mysteries originally for boys, I always created them to the standards of the canon of the Conan Doyle stories, and to the Sherlockian methods of observation and deduction. And I do my homework. If I present a detail in any of my stories, whether of history, period, place, or character, I research it and try to be 100% accurate, even though it’s still a work of fiction. But as fact is stranger than fiction, you are given a lot of leeway with a fictional story, however strange, so long as you can lead the listeners through the details of the story to a logical possible – albeit improbable – conclusion. That’s the cardinal doctrine of Sherlockian story lore. But however plausible you may make your story, you’ve no right to expect even the most naïve listener or reader to then suspend disbelief to make up for a story line that’s not even remotely possible. While boys and girls are not so naïve these days, they have a certain distrust in their rein on their own imaginations that they relinquish it to the control of others. They may be willing to believe that Santa Claus exists for as long as they’re told that he does, until their parents decide it’s time to sit them down and tell him that doesn’t. When I was a boy, my parents waited for me to ask them, “Is there such thing as Santa?” And then they asked me, “What do you think?” Any story I tell them, whether fact or fiction, I’m not halfway through it before one of my younger listeners demands to know if it’s true or not. My answer to them is “What do you think?” But I was moved by a question a woman in my audience asked me about a family of sisters in one of my Holmes stories I was telling this summer. She honestly wanted to know if the sisters were somehow related to me! She said that I spoke of them as if I knew them personally, and I’d made her care about them, too. I had to swallow down a huge lump in my throat before I could answer her, and told her that I had made them up. I figured she was old enough to handle the shock. She replied, “Oh, it’s just so hard to believe they’re not real, the way you talked about them. You made me wish I could have met them. I hope that they’ll be all right.” This was a mature, intelligent woman who’d heard me tell one of my Holmes mysteries for the first time. Not knowing what to expect of my story, she had not come with any intention to willingly suspend her disbelief if the story probably wasn’t true. She had not asked whether the story was true or not, though by her own admission she had been completely taken in by the telling of the story. But her enjoyment in hearing the rest of the story was in no way diminished. If anything, by her statement that she hoped that the sisters would be all right, she believed in the story and its characters more than she believed my denial that they really existed. After a while, even I believe that those characters in my stories exist, and I more than anybody should know better. People can’t feel that way about characters where there’s no dimension to them or plausibility in their story.
G.B. In light of that, I suppose it wasn’t really so hard to adapt your Holmes stories for adults to enjoy, which you’d at first created to reintroduce Boy Scouting’s founder’s emphasis on the lost skill of Sherlocking.
Riggs Not hard at all, when you remember that the original Holmes stories by Conan Doyle were also written to be suitable reading for adults and young people alike. The first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a family magazine. The in-home entertainment of that day was reading, and the basic literacy of children and adults in the average Victorian family, given the level of formal education, made the literature that came into the home just as much within the reach of pre-teen boys and girls as of their parents. That’s assuming any or all of the members of a family could read. But even if one member of a family could read, and could spare the shilling for that first edition ever where Holmes was introduced to the British reading public, the whole family was going to be able to hear, enjoy, and thrill to the horrors of scenes of murder, and benefit from Holmes’s instructive methods of detection. In 1892, the first edition of The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes was published. It’s pretty clear what age level and gender that book was aimed at. But its contents were not stories specifically at the 12-year-old level. They were two novellas and four short stories of the same Sherlock Holmes adventures that had already been previously published for the general reading public over the past five years. That book went into three editions, and was enlarged in the 1960’s to three Holmes novellas and six short story adventures – all old standards by Doyle. Just as Doyle’s original Holmes stories had been written for everybody to enjoy, so have my Holmes stories in The Unusual Sherlock Holmes, as well as the sequel of these stories I’m currently bringing together.
G.B. When you speak of the same basic literacy and levels of education shared by children and adults of that day, are you familiar with that popular game show on the Fox Network: Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?
Riggs I sure am. My wife and I wouldn’t miss it.
G.B. In that show, grown-up contestants pit their adult minds and college educations against questions of first through fifth grade class subjects, and enlist the help of a class of regular nine, ten, eleven year-old boys and girls to keep them from ‘flunking out’. But to date, all those contestants have fallen short of the million-dollar prize, and have all had to face the American public with the admission, “I am not smarter than a fifth grader.”
Riggs Looks like that hasn’t changed in our day from Victorian times.
G.B. No, apparently not. But even though you’ve established that your Holmes stories have the same broad age appeal as Conan Doyle’s, can you erase their Scouting stigma in the eyes of the critics?
Riggs Now, remember, you’re the one who said ‘stigma’.
G.B. I guess I did. But, without coming right out admitting to stigmatizing your book for its association with Scouting, it’s lying subconsciously in these certain Sherlock scholars’ minds, when they set your book at the preteen age bracket – about the age of a Boy Scout or younger.
Riggs Well, Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes for the general reading public, not for scholars. In that case, I’m in good company with Conan Doyle, and with Sherlock Holmes, too. And since Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were recommended reading for Boy Scouts in training in Sherlocking, his own works should also be considered associated with Scouting. What’s more, Doyle was an active member of the council of the Boy’s Empire League and their magazine Boys of the Empire, which published the serialized version of Baden-Powell’s cavalry manual, Aids to Scouting, under the title of ‘The Boy Scout’, thus playing a significant role in the advancement of the Boy Scout movement. And in his very first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes introduces a sort of boys’ patrol – ‘The Baker Street Irregulars’ – whom he has mentored into the skill of Sherlocking, making him a sort of prototype of a Scoutmaster. That story was set in about 1881: twenty-six years before Boy Scouting began.
G.B. That’s rich! You do do your homework, don’t you?
Riggs My penance for not doing any when I went to school.
G.B. So you don’t feel there’s any substance to a claim by one certain scholarly critic that because – as he puts it – “ ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ abound and women are either sweet and true or scheming and conniving and villains are always nasty” in your stories, they are designed for youngsters.
Riggs The hallmark of the Victorian genre of mystery writing always portrays protagonists and antagonists as ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, and the roles of the women, ‘sweet and true’, or ‘scheming and conniving’. And their villains were always nasty. Aren’t villains supposed to be? If you’re keeping true to the integrity of Victorian detective mystery writing, that’s how it has to go down. A multi-faceted late twentieth/early twenty-first century villain might be written with a good side to offset his evil side, but if he’s committing murder and robbing banks, does it matter how much he’s giving to the United Way? There were two cases in Doyle’s Holmes stories of villains who had a charitable side to them as well, but Holmes still saw that society was better off having them put away.
G.B. Well put. But how about his charges that your scientific content and historical accuracy are “kept at a twelve-year-old level, plausible but unable to stand more than casual scrutiny”?
Riggs Again, when you get at historic accuracy, we have the advantage (or maybe the disadvantage) of looking back on a historic period, which people living in it did not have. People living in an era of history are eyewitness to only an aspect of it, but they have a closer view of it than the historian who claims a panoramic view in hindsight, not to mention a biased, judgmental perspective of a succeeding ‘modern day’ that deludes itself into thinking they are smarter and better than anything that came before them. And whenever you interweave fiction into history there will be gaps in the fabric of time. If even a twelve-year-old can allow for that, can’t a grown-up do it, too? As for scientific content, I’m assuming the critic’s alluding to Magnus Stern-Master’s space ship.
G.B. Yes, or as he put it: “a clandestine moon voyager and would-be world conqueror”.
Riggs Well, what might a Victorian speculate as a feasible means for space travel (if he even regarded such an impossibility at all)? It was a subject of some fascination in those days. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon had then recently been translated into English. But by then, rocket propulsion or the use of a gigantic cannon would have been put down as too crude, primitive means for lifting off from the Earth. Electricity and magnetos for powering homes and factories would have been considered cutting-edge technologies that offered endless possibilities in the Victorian mind, including conquering the frontier of space. With these new technologies to hand, a Victorian who might be bent on developing the best possible means for space travel would have looked askance at something so dangerous and unstable as putting a larger version of a child’s Roman candle under any sound-minded space explorer. I’m sure they would be disillusioned that NASA hasn’t come up with something better than that after nearly fifty years of trying. And it needs to be remembered that I was trying to keep in mind what a Victorian reader would have expected was possible of space travel with the most modern capabilities of his time.
G.B. That works for me. So what does your critic see in your story, The Riddle of the Persian Slipper – about an attempt to supply stolen repeating rifles to Afghan rebels in the 1870’s – that he regards it as unfeasible to any but a twelve-year-old boy?
Riggs That beats me. Bob Whiter (President of the Golden Jubilee Chapter of The Royal Society of St. George, an armorer in the Second World War for the British Army with a lifelong interest in weapons and military history, and an expert in the canon Doyle’s Holmes adventures) enjoyed reading my book, and was most impressed with the research that had gone into the description of the guns and other weapons and the stories’ historical contents. When the British army fought the Afghans in the Second Afghan War, they were out-manned by the Afghan forces, and stuck in hostile country that they were ill equipped to survive in. Their only advantage was that they had a breech-loading rifle that could reload faster than the muzzle-loaders that the Afghan troops were using. Even so, the Brits still were hanging on by their fingernails. There did exist at that time a bolt action repeating rifle made by Remington for the Indian Bureau in America, kept in limited supply for emergency use in the event of another Indian uprising after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where the Indians had had the rapid-fire advantage over the 7th Cavalry. Just one thousand of these rifles in the hands of a single unit of Afghan troops would have turned the tide of the Anglo-Afghan War, and tipped the balance of British might, and could have hastened the instability that we’re experiencing in the world today. The Riddle of the Persian Slipper poses what feasible potential for disaster may have come of one man with ambitions, supplying a group of political extremists with superior weapons.
G.B. Déjà vu! Finally, what would you say to the critic’s assessment of the setting for The Scarlet Baldrics Mystery as a group of medieval re-enactors of the Knights of the Round Table?
Riggs Well, that’s not accurate to call them medieval re-enactors only as they are known in the United States, who receive very little of the appreciation due to them for the enthusiasm that compels their period research and painstaking attention to their costumes and role-playing. England’s pageantry, honoring their ancient traditions and heritage, is as old as the traditions they celebrate, and is not observed by clubs of enthusiasts alone. Regimental and Territorial Army units maintain special companies that keep alive the earliest vestiges of English soldiery’s weapons, costumes, and skills-at-arms. For all the festive fun attached to their turnouts for the public to enjoy, these are sacred displays in memory of the soldiers of long ago who laid down their lives for their monarch and their country, just as brave Britons in uniform–proud in their identity with their service’s tradition–still do today. That is the story behind the yeomanry company in The Scarlet Baldrics Mystery; no mere re-enactors, they were a citizen army of sorts who would have been chartered by a royal charter, and trained and commanded by the lord of Logres Manor, who held the equivalent of a Queen’s Commission as lord-lieutenant. Logres Manor is a fictional estate and the site of the Scarlet Baldrics’ encampment, and just within a mile of the town of Camelford. This is one of several locations with the claim to being the site of the real Camelot. I’ve had many readers who have said this story was a particular favorite. It does have something for everybody: action, supernatural, swordplay, drama, humor, and romance. But most of all, it has Holmes and his usual incisive use of observation and deduction navigating his way through the twists and turns of a mystery, which is really what it’s all about in all of the stories in my book.
G.B Really, I’d be hard-pressed to say which of your stories my favorite is. Scarlet Baldrics was delightful, of course. It gave me a new fascination with Camelot beyond Lerner and Loew. But then, as one who’s vacationed in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula many times, the setting of the Persian Slipper story, leading Holmes back to recall his visit to Copper Harbor gave me the itch to go back there again, myself; to enjoy a pipe and a mug of cocoa on the porch of one of the cottages overlooking the harbor, and to take a tour around Fort Wilkins State Park. And on my boat ride over to Isle Royale, I could actually relive in my imagination that gun battle between Holmes and the soldiers with the crew of the Hellaniki. The setting of The Clockwork Astroglobe struck a chord with my love for the fall season, with its nineteenth century English counterpart of our Michigan color tours and visits to a cider mill for a gallon of fresh-pressed cider and hot doughnuts—an overnighter to a Kentish village inn for stodgy English country cooking. That gave Holmes and Watson something to smack their lips over while they puzzled over that science fiction mystery, which would have intrigued Jules Verne. Some of those recipes are intriguing, too. Is your next book going to be a Sherlock Holmes cookbook?
Riggs Well, there’s an idea. And I do have the recipes for Mrs. Auldsmith’s spotted dick pudding and her cherry crumble that are mentioned in The Clockwork Astroglobe. Right now, though, I am working on a sequel to this book, due out in 2008.
Next: Jerry B-P Riggs tells about the sequel to The Unusual Sherlock Holmes:
“Holmes to the Country”!
Holmes to the Country:
Author Jerry B-P Riggs (at right) displays his prototype Missouri Meerschaum similar to that described in his upcoming sequel to The Unusual Sherlock Holmes. When asked whether he smokes the Holmesian ‘black shag’ tobacco, he replied, “I’m strictly a burley man: Prince Albert, Sir Walter Raleigh, and (when I can afford it) Briggs. For more information on ordering copies of his current book as well as to order the ‘Sherlockian Scout’ pin, contact Riggs at :
Jerry B-P Riggs
303 S. Norton St.
Corunna, MI 48817
OR:
sherlockianscout@yahoo.com
This article in Arizona State University's Web Devil (the online version of their campus newspaper) is carrying an article that extols the virtues of eschewing cigars and cigarettes for puffing on a pipe.
Aside from a few mistakes (it is Ford & Haig, the tobacconist not Ford and Hagel) it is a fairly balanced piece. While not a particularly imaginative piece, at least it isn't the usual PC or hyper-liberal propaganda you find in many school publications.
Pity the couldn't picked a more dashing character than the goober they used to illustrate the story. The "school" blazer, bow tie and beard makes him look quite pretentious while most of the young smokers we see coming into the Barn these days...
Ever since we launched the MeerschaumPipes.com website a few weeks ago, we've been receiving a great deal of email from people about the meerschaum pipes that they have received, mostly by inheritance. The following inquiry prodded my admittedly sorry memory to realize that I never posted about our visit to Sevket during our trip to Eskisehir last spring.
From: Gary P.
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 12:54 PM
To: mjg@tobacco-barn.com
Subject: Question from MeerschaumPipes.com Website
I acquired a nice little Sevket pipe and I gather that is the name of the carver, and is he contemporary ? What can you tell me about this make of pipe ?
Yes, Sevket Gezer is one of the master carvers and is certainly a contemporary carver. You'll find more information about him on his page at the PipeTrader Wiki. Of course, if you have information about a carver, or you are a carver yourself, please feel free to create a new entry on the Wiki. This is a great way to get/give some love (and search engine juice) to your favorite carver.
At left is a picture of him from our last trip to Turkey. He was kind enough to allow us to visit him in his home in Eskisehir...
He is holding a pipe we had commissioned him to make on behalf of a customer of ours to give as a gift. It was a beautiful floral saxophone pipe with the dental insignia on the front and "excellence in dentistry" carved in Latin around the lip of the bowl.
Truly an exceptional gentleman and and even more talented carver!
While we are talking about colored meerschaum pipes... I figured I'd have to brag on MY Cottom's Choice pipe. Unfortunately, I wasn't eligible to participate in the Coloring Contest so I figured since I'm doing the work on the blog, I can brag a little bit. Does that make me a bad person? Mine is the rusticated pipe in the middle...
Jim Allison, previous owner of the Tobacco Barn, brought in a few more pipes to show off to show what is possible. Granted, all the pipes in this contest have been colored for only the past 6 months so it was great to see a few examples of some pipes that have been colored just a little bit longer. I've posted one before but here are two more:
I soooooo love this pipe... I might have to arrange for an "accident" to happen to get my hands on it<G>...
This one is similar to the one that we've shown before except it has the most amazing milk amber stem...
This album cover was posted recently on ClubStogie's pipe smoking forum. Thought it was kinda fun and should be spread far and wide!
Well, we'll get to that in a minute. All of us at the Tobacco Barn would like to thank all the customers who bought a Cottom's Choice pipe and in particular, those who participated in our Cottom's Choice Coloring Contest tonight!
In addition to entries here in the store, we also had a mail-in entry from a customer of ours in Japan. Unfortunately, we were unable to use his pictures in the main voting but he won a special award from the judges for having the pipe furthest away from the store.
Our entrants awaited anxiously for the results of Tom Cottom's inspection of the pipes. After discounting the pipes presented by two employees (the judge himself included) he moved on to those presented for consideration by our customers.
After careful consideration, he chose to award the top prize of the 2007 Cottom's Choice Coloring Contest to Steve Kerrigan of Silverado. Top honors were awarded to his smooth pipe for the overall job of coloring his pipe. As with some meerschaum, the majority of his bowl is starting out a slight purple shade, turning brown the closer it got to the rim. He got extra points for not having an darkly colored stem (a sure sign usually of a "hot" smoker) like some of the entries. Steve credits his coloring to just smoking it a lot with our Treasure Chest and Anniversary blends. An informal poll of other contestants was inconclusive if light aromatics did a better job than English or Virginia blends.
Steve opted to take a gift card as his prize rather than selecting either smooth #49 or the rustic #50. The pipes were placed back into the pool of available pipes for purchase only to have the last remaining rusticated pipe get snapped up by one of the other customers who had been lusting after it in the case for the last few months.
Special thanks to all who participated and we look forward to seeing if we can convince Tom to design another annual pipe for 2008. Let's hope so as this was fun as people vied to claim the title of best colored Cottom's Choice pipe for 2007!
when you should be working. Actually, I found these while multi-tasking doing some SEO research (i.e. searching on various terms and seeing how we turn up) when I ran across these pictures on Flikr from jrmccl. It was quite fun to see what he thought of our meerschaum pipes...
I really should get my act together and post my photos from the Tenth Annual Northern California Pipe & Cigar Show...
The sky absorbed faint light. Silhouettes formed in familiar shapes.
Trees of winter spread their skeletal hands and fingers.
This day had no body, just a spirit.
No sound, simple stillness filled all space.
Only the eyes and the soul could observe such a perfect moment.
An awareness is felt. Nearness is noted.
The thin veil appears as a light fog.
Friends and family, just beyond, respond with warm smiling faces.
Their happiness to be with you makes your feelings of joy grow beyond all measure.
They all express wishes to be together.
You want to join them and share all the happiness. All of you know the you all will be together.
But for now you cannot because you are........
Not Dead Yet!!!
That Meerschaum was, at one point in time, used for snow flakes in snow globes? Well it was! It appears that snow globes, which started over 100 years ago in Paris, have used porcelain, bone, sand, non-soluble soap or metal flakes as well as Meerschaum before they settled on the inevitable plastic chips they use today.
Doesn't have a lot to do with pipes but I'm sucker for anything new I learn about Meerschaum.
These little tidbits courtesy of icWales.
President Bush Vetoes SCHIP Expansion Bill For The Second Time
President George W. Bush on December 12th vetoed for the second time legislation aimed at expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) by $35 billion over five years exclusively funded by increases in the Federal excise tax rates on tobacco products, saying "our nation's goal should be to move children who have no health insurance to private coverage, not to move children who already have private health insurance to government coverage."
President Bush had vetoed the original SCHIP bill on October 3rd, 
arguing that the $35 billion expansion is too costly, took the program too far from its original intent to help the poor, and would be a step toward federalizing healthcare. The US House on October 18th sustained the presidential veto in a 273-156 vote. In a bid to win over more Republicans, US House Democrats on October 24th proposed a new version of the SCHIP bill that retained the amount of expansion and funding source, but tightened eligibility rules, generally barring coverage to illegal immigrants, childless adults and children of families with incomes exceeding three times the poverty level. However, the revised measure secured a veto-proof margin only in the Democrat-controlled Senate, while House Republicans held enough of their members together to sustain a presidential veto. With only a few days left in the congressional session, it is not clear if Congress would schedule a veto override vote, which is expected to almost certainly fail (Politico.com 12/12).
Extension Expected to be Approved by Congress
As we are in constant contact with our federal lobbyists who have been closely monitoring this SCHIP issue, popular consensus, both public, from the media, and more private channels within the "Beltway," holds that a veto override vote will fail for there remains the lack of support to muster a two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives to override the president's veto.
At this point, as the current congressional extension (following the first failed veto override vote) for SCHIP program expires December 14th, there will most likely be another extension to fund the program into 2008.
As this issue continues becoming more contentious on Capitol Hill, we urge all of you to remain calm, but vigilant. At this time, it is not necessary to contact your Congressmen and urge them to oppose a veto override attempt, as there is not enough support to approve such a legislative attempt.
The current Congressional session adjourns Dec. 22.
More than a half century ago an interest in became a fondness for the tobacco smoking pipe.
Owning and operating the Tobacco Barn for 45 years established lifelong friendships and a smoking "family"
The relationship with the smoke shop grew throughout the years that we were one.
Our first customer was and still is a customer and best friend. He has been with the store over fifty years. Our greetings for each other today, when we meet is "Thank God, you are not dead yet"
I have entered the "Eighties" and he is somewhat ahead of me. Many of our pipes are older than we. The pipes were made in the mid eighteen hundreds. 1895, 1912, 1927,1934, 1940 etc are the birth years of many of them.
A pipe is never used up, consumed. It becomes a friend, a companion. You may be alone in the forest when you go, sit on a stump, fill and light your pipe. You are sharing a moment with an old friend. It is a investment in abstract values.
A pipe becomes dearer each year. The pipes' grain, texture and patina becomes familiar to your touch.
In your Sixties, Seventies and Eighties you recall life's memories when you and your pipe were young.
A pipe is not just a smoke, it is mental relaxation. It prompts deeper thinking and Stimulates memories.
A box of cigars is consumed and forgotten. The same expense puts a pipe in your hand for the rest of your life.
After being nothing but a redirect to our meerschaum page, MeerschaumPipes.com has been reborn. Now, MeerschaumPipes.com will answer everyone's questions about meerschaum pipes.
We've got links addresses to retail stores near you carrying IK Meerschaum products, areas to learn about meerschaum, links to Meerschaum and pipe smoking forums and much more.
So go check it out: http://www.meerschaumpipes.com/.
Aside from the obvious disclaimer to make up front (my company imports meerschaum pipes and accessories from Turkey so you might think me biased), I would like to sing the praise of Meerschaum as a material for tobacco pipes.
I feel that a finely crafted piece of meerschaum stone can be the best possible material to use for fine tobacco pipes for any number of reasons. Below, you'll find a list of them (in no particular order):
- Meerschaum is lighter than briar in most cases. The nature of this particular material is that it is particularly light when compared to most stones or minerals after the water has been removed from it.
- Meerschaum is porous and acts as a filter, drawing tars and moisture out of the smoke before it reaches your mouth.
- Meerschaum is neutral and imparts no flavor to the tobacco like a briar pipe will. This allows you to get the true flavor of the particular blend you are smoking.
- Meerschaum will not burn like briar. Since you cannot catch a meerschaum pipe on fire, there is no need to build a cake of carbon around the bowl to protect it.
- You can safely smoke any number of different types of tobaccos (aromatics, English, Virginia, burley, etc) back to back without fear of muddling the cake with different flavors/aromas like you do with a briar pipe since you don't need a cake. I can safely smoke a bowl of Stokkebye's Luxury Bullseye Flake and a bowl of Cambridge back to back without having the aroma/flavor from one affect the other.
- You don't need to rest a Meerschaum Pipe between smokes. Because the stone absorbs and gives off liquid much quicker than briar and it also cools quicker, you don't need to let your pipe rest after smoking it. This means that you will need to keep fewer pipes in your quiver and you can still smoke as much as you'd like.
- Meerschaum gives you a cooler smoking experience. Because Meerschaum is a much better conduit for heat than briar (which actually is more of an insulator than conductor of heat), the heat drawn off the smoke contributes to a cooler smoke.
Anyone else have any reasons why they smoke Meerschaum pipes? If so, please send us a comment using the links below...
Not only do we have the much-anticipated Sherlockian Scout Badges in stock, but they came in at a reduced price from their original estimate.
Right now, you can order in time for Holiday deliveries this 1 1/4 inch pin that is recessed and embossed in brass, enamelled in seven colours with a butterfly clasp on the back.
For order information or to learn more about The Legend of the Badge of the Sherlockian Scout, visit this page.
AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY ‘B-P’ RIGGS: AUTHOR OF THE UNUSUAL SHERLOCK HOLMES
By Gordon Beecher, editor of The Norton Street Acrostic, reprinted with permission
Some Holmes ‘scholars’ make the same criticism for the contents of this new collection of Holmes novellas that have been made against the original canon of Holmes stories by A. Conan Doyle for years. But are they just for kids, or is their subject matter ‘ ’? “They were written for everybody to enjoy, just as Doyle’s original Holmes stories had been,” the author says, and readers, young and old alike, agree. Riggs answers his detractors’ criticisms and clarifies some of their inaccuracies in their synopses of his stories in this exclusive interview.
Interviewed by Gordon Beecher, editor for The Norton Street Acrostic.
G.B. I am interviewing Jerry ‘B-P’ Riggs, author of The Unusual Sherlock Holmes, a collection of three new original Sherlock Holmes mystery novellas published by InfinityPublishing.com. What motivated you to follow in the footsteps of Conan Doyle, to write these Holmes mysteries?
Riggs Probably more apt to say, ‘follow in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes’. In fact, I’d never meant to write them down at all. They’d begun as a number of series of campfire yarns for Cubs and Boy Scouts, which posed problems requiring the use of observation and deduction to solve the case over a four-day camp session. I catalogued the story and the details of each mystery in my head, and sort of rattled them off for my hearers, handed out a clue packet of maps, diagrams, and illustrations to each group, and left them to ponder the evidence and set the wheels in their heads to turning in the deduction of the solution. But adults were hooked on it, too, and when I made some passing mention of it to people from time to time over the course of the next several years, they said they’d like to read my notes I’d made for my stories. They were shocked to learn that I’d never made any. I don’t think that most people who know me could believe I could organize and store all that data in my head. Frankly, when I came to think about it, I didn’t believe I could, either. That was when I got a little concerned: if I’d ever wanted to use any of these stories again, and lost them, I’d have felt awful about it. Then there were a few camps where health issues kept me from being able to tell one or two of these mysteries that I’d spent months preparing, and that a large number of my ‘fan-base’ would not get the chance to hear the mystery they’d waited all year to hear. One of these times, I’d become ill the last day of the camp, and the campers never got to hear the conclusion to the mystery at all. That had to be one of the worst days of my life, letting down so many folks who’d waited so anxiously to hear the end of the story. That was when I knew that I had to write these stories down. It was a whole ‘nother matter to write them, with my only audience being a piece of typing paper or a computer screen, without the energy of a crowd to feed off of. But I was never alone at it. I found in the process that I got to know my story and my characters better: watching and listening as the story unfolded in the room where I worked, transporting me to their places and times with their sights and sounds and scents and feelings. Funny, my teachers had always gotten down on me for daydreaming in class: ‘in my own little world’. I hope some of them are still around to read what that little world of mine produced. Maybe they’d give me a good grade on it, after all.
G.B. I suspect that they would. You take an old-fashioned style to your writing that gives it a Doyle-ian flavor, and hints at a strong empathy towards the Victorian period.
Riggs Well, Doyle was a Victorian man, writing about extraordinary situations in the setting of Victorian England. And the Sherlock Holmes he wrote of – however unique he was for his time, or for any other time – was a Victorian man, and therefore the product of the time he lived in. I do throw back a lot to a strong Victorian influence from old English relatives that I grew up around. Even though they had come across the pond a long while before, they’d held stubbornly, unapologetically to their Victorian and English thinking and way of life. They were wonderfully quirky and kindly people, but remained firmly entrenched in their way, and it became engrafted in me. I try to do homage to them in the way I think and live, as well as write: not trying to sit in judgment of the Victorian attitudes with the biases that skew the late twentieth and twenty-first century worldviews of the past. There’s a world of difference between how one looks back at a period of history, and how the real people who lived it from day to day saw it.
G.B. You clearly have a great passion for perpetuating the lore of Sherlock Holmes for generations to come, there’s no question about that. And not just to get people hooked on the love of reading by garnering an interest in Doyle’s Holmes stories (and yours), but you stress their use of the stories to train them to take a closer look at their surroundings and to learn to think about what they observe. This has birthed your one-man cause for ‘Sherlockian Scouting’ (raising awareness of what’s called ‘Sherlocking’, and its former place in Boy Scouting as its principal skill). Then you are the advocate for the eight principles to extending education beyond the school walls for children and adults: S.H.E.R.L.O.C.K. What are these?
Riggs See, Hear, Examine, Read, Learn, Observe, Conclude, Know. I call them the eight secrets of Sherlock Holmes’s success. They do line themselves up nicely as Holmes’s attributes as a detective. Everybody’s so concerned about the epidemic of flabby physiques these days, and rightly so. But there’s not as much alarm over the flabbiness of the thinking/remembering part of the mind and of the senses’ capacities for perception instead of self-indulgence. Just as jogging is good for the fitness of the body, S.H.E.R.L.O.C.K. is a fitness program to ‘jog’ the mind and the senses. Not that everybody who’d follow them would come out at the other end as detectives per se, but the art of detection will make a person safer every time they walk out the door, or drive down the road, and more successful in every walk of life. Conan Doyle’s own real-life inspiration for the methods of Holmes was Joseph Bell. He wasn’t a detective, but a successful doctor and an eminent professor of medicine at Edinburgh University. His phenomenal success as a diagnostician was founded on his mastery of the art of detection.
G.B. So, when and where did this passion first take root in you, and how did it evolve?
Riggs It all began when I was a very young boy, the first time I ever heard someone speak the name of Sherlock Holmes. Whenever someone did something uncommonly clever (or not so clever, inviting a sort of sarcastic compliment), someone would say, “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you?” When my curiosity got the better of me, I asked, “Who’s Sherlock Holmes?” And the answer came back, “The world’s greatest detective.” Then, while I was a student at Walter French Junior High School, I saw in the bookstore a little paperback book. On its cover was a Christopher Plumber-looking fellow in an Inverness cape and deerstalker, smoking a calabash pipe and looking very smug, standing next to the title emblazoned there: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It took all of my lunch money (45¢!) to buy it. The first story I read was The Speckled Band. To this day, I still get the same chill up my spine when I read it and me eyes fall on the dying words of Julia Stoner: “It was the band! The speckled band!” From that instant, you might say I was bit. About the same time, I read in Readers’ Digest, a story about the impact of the Holmes stories on the world. It especially impressed me that, far from being mere works of fiction, the methods used by Holmes in those stories made them instructional lessons for police agencies around the world. Forensic pathology and criminal profiling today can trace their roots back to Sherlock Holmes, too. (Not that some of them would want to admit that. But some of them would.) As a Boy Scout, I grew into a big fan of Baden-Powell, the British cavalry scout who started the Scouting movement. In his experiences, working with native scouts and trackers in India and Africa, he saw an exact parallel with the methods they used to those Holmes used. He applied these detective methods in the Holmes stories to train soldiers as cavalry scouts, to develop their skills of observation and deduction. Baden-Powell coined the word ‘Sherlocking’ for observation, deduction, and tracking. When he adapted the program for boys, he retained Sherlocking. In fact, he had regarded it as the principal skill to any program for the training of Scoutcraft. So important, that in his first experimental Boy Scout camp on Brownsea Island in 1907, with only eight days to train twenty-one boys to pass to their First Class rank, Sherlocking was the only skill that had two solid days devoted to it.
G.B. Wow! I never knew about that. As a matter of fact, of all the skills that normally come to mind when somebody thinks of Boy Scouts, detective work isn’t one I think most people would think of.
Riggs Unfortunately, no; not even most Scouts know about it today. Most of the backwoods skills have been retained, but even some of these have been cut; Morse code and semaphore, for instance. The codes have completely disappeared from the Scout handbook. Not that it was even used that much anymore in my day, but it built the memory and concentration, and there’s always that chance that it could come in handy, and has done. I still remember my Morse, after having learned it more than forty years ago. There was even a time when the B.S.A. nearly took backwoodsmanship out of the program entirely for what they’d called ‘urban scouting’. That almost killed Scouting in the U.S. But since the program had been to train Scouts, whose primary function was as spies in the field, Sherlocking was most important, with the backwoods skills taught for them to survive. But Sherlocking had a peaceful advantage, too: training the senses to notice things, teaching problem solving, reasoning, better concentration, memory, initiative, and empathy for others. Anyway, that was when I began to re-introduce Sherlocking through my story telling, with three part and four part Holmes mysteries of my own invention. I didn’t dare adapt one of Conan Doyle’s stories. There was always the chance one of the boys had read the very one I would have chosen. So I just made them up, giving the Scouts just part of the story at a time, with clues enough for them to work out, that by the end of the next to the last installment, they had all that they needed to solve the mystery before I disclosed it.
G.B. So, were the stories made for boys?
Riggs That was what I thought at the time. On the other hand, when you talk of stories for boys (and girls, who’ve also made a goodly part of my audiences), these are not the namby-pamby stories that rest safely in the category of what the politically correct call ‘age-appropriate’. Holmes still smokes his pipe a lot (horrors!). There’s murder, gunfights, kidnaps, mutilations and rotting corpses. These aren’t nursery rhymes. If boys and girls like this sort of thing instead, it’s because they hate being talked at like babies. And I hear from most parents that they resent the saccharin stories that they have to sit around and hear some Mother Goose re-enactor inflict on their kids. They want to be given credit for knowing that bad things happen in the world, and they want to learn how to do something about it. And they want someone on the scene - unflappable in the face of insurmountable circumstances – who’ll take the problem by the horns; not with magic or superhuman powers, but with a certain knowledge and wisdom that might give someone something real that they can use themselves. That’s Sherlock Holmes to a tee. Grown-ups want to identify with that even more than kids. This fact was borne out when I noticed that the parents and adult Scout leaders were really getting into the stories, too. Suddenly I had this whole other following of grown-up listeners, as eager to get back to my campfire to hear the next installment. Over the years, I’ve had parents tell me that they’ve planned their vacation time around the date of the camps, just to hear my latest Holmes mystery. Some of these are dyed in the wool Holmes fanatics, others became converts to reading Holmes stories after hearing my stories. They were the ones who’ve told me, “Jerry, these stories are too good to just share with the kids, or to just store them in your head. You’ve got to write them down into a book.” When finally I did, the parents would most often buy two copies: one for their kids, and one for themselves, saying, “This one’s mine. Nobody’s going to get it away from me!” And both kids and grown-ups told me, “Write another one.”
End of Part One of ‘An Interview with Jerry B-P Riggs
…Due Out Next Year! (2008)
Three more original Sherlock Holmes novellas from Sherlockian author Jerry B-P Riggs
Ok, so it is from a competing vendor but what the heck. They mix together some really nice pipe making (starting with "chopping" the stone into the rough shape of the pipe all the way through fitting the stem to the pipe) and then show waxing process using what appears to be chess pieces that have been burned to get the color you see. Enjoy!
Folks across the Internet have been trumpeting for a few weeks now their "victory" over paid content when the venerable New York Times opened up their vaults to the Internet hordes looking for free information. So this may not be news to those believe data wants to be free but for pipe smokers, this can provide some great insight into a time when smoking was much more acceptable.
Doing some research on meerschaum at the turn of the last century I stumbled upon some articles and letter that caught my eye.
Let's get started with the article "How to Color a Meerschaum Pipe" from The Edinburgh Scotsman originally from November 24, 1895 gives some details about a skill that seems much in debate these days, as it was then.