Kapnismologist":ezdp19m4 said:
A thought:
If one has spent more money on pipes than on tobacco, one is a collector. If one has spent more money on tobacco than on pipes, then one is a pipe smoker (or, perhaps a tobacco lover who just happens to enjoy it in pipes, as the case may be).
That sort of assumes that the money spent on tobacco is on tobacco smoked. Now time may prove them right, but some folks have enough tobacco cellared to last them for the next century, "just in case". :twisted:
I imagine there was some poor soul in New Orleans with the approach of Katrina was debating whether he should pack up the wife and kids, or the rest of his cellar. (as they say: "that's when the fight started....")
I am a smoker, I buy estate pipes to rehabilitate and hopefully improve my rotation. All the pipes i smoke are good enough, but some are definitely better than others, and I am always on the look for improvement. I would not hesitate to duplicate one of the "great smokers", because they are basically tools to me.
There are some who are acquirers. Caught in the clutches of PAD, they acquire new pipes like some people shop for shoes, ties, or fishing lures. As long as it isn't the mortgage or grocery money, or the kids college money, I suppose that is all right. There are wealthy acquirers, and there are poor acquirers, the latter may have a trunk full of rundown and broken cobs and Dr. Gs, and his smokers are held together with duct tape and wire.
Now collectors are a refined form of acquirer, and they have an area in which they collect. Alfred Dunhill collected pipes historically important in smoking, and it became a museum. A Bill Gates could attempt to collect, say, one of each Dunhill pipe made, and still be searching 50 years from now for the rarer pipes. A more limited Dunhill collection might target a sample of all the marking variations over the years.
On the other end of the spectrum there is a fantastic collector and collection of the innovative "the pipe". These pipes made of "rocket age" material were all the rage at one time, and sold as premium pipes everywhere, sold in the thousands. Now days they typically sell in the 5 to 20 dollar range. [See:
http://www.thepipe.info/history/index.html ]
All the collectors have some theme and limit on where their interest lies. A collection could totally unsmokable, like historical clays, dug from the old outhouse holes of a western mining time (Well I wouldn't smoke 'em :lol!: ). It could be immanently smokable, a representative collection of Danish free form carvers, or Kaywoodie straight grain pipes.
Being a "collector" is more socially acceptable than being a "mere" accumulator.
