Often when a friend or family member wants or gets a new car, we tend to see them everywhere. Case in point; I've wanted a Chevy HHR ever since I saw one in a magazine ad back in 2005. To my eye, they looked pretty cool, had a lot of room, and had a front that reminded me of classic trucks from the 1940s. I finally got a "victory red" one last year. When I talked to my friends and family about it, they started to notice them all over the roads. My mother even started pointing them out when she was with friends. The same is true for pipes. When I started making pipes in 2006, my family started to notice pipe smokers in a different way; pleasant. "My son makes pipes" is something my mother proudly tells people; even those at her church. To say I have renown with church-going women in their fifties and sixties is pretty cool. Then again, most of their husbands and fathers smoked pipes.

Our newest employee, Christopher Huff, has been writing about some pipes, as well as entering them in our database. Naturally, due to learning more about the brands, shapes, and finishes, he started noticing them more and more outside of work. Only yesterday he turned to me with a story about seeing a pipe in a movie and thinking he knew what it was. "It looked like a Peterson, I think. Kind of an Oom Paul shape". He was referring to a scene from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966). Lee Van Cleef also smokes a pipe in "For a Few Dollars More", as Eric has noted, complete with orange acrylic stem (which Chris realized was inappropriate for the time period), and gives off his famous, one-of-a-kind beady-eyed stare. Other movies and old television shows are full of pipes once we start to pick them out. Heck, in a Seinfeld episode I watched recently (the one where Kramer's life stories are purchased by J. Peterman), Kramer is sitting in his office smoking a pipe that looks a lot like an old Comoy's Billiard - complete with C-inlay on the left side of the stem.

When we become informed, interested, and especially passionate about something, the world around us seems to make them pop up like dandelions. Given that, tonight we have quite a spread of pipes for you to sate that interest of yours. Rad Davis, Tonni Nielsen, and Simeon Turner all have offerings. Ashton, L'Anatra, Randy Wiley, Winslow, Nording, Peterson, Stanwell, and Savinelli have pipes as well. (My guess is that Lee Von Cleef was smoking a Savinelli, considering the shape and stem color - and fact the movie was made in Italy). And, if you want to find something more unusual, one never knows what will pop up in the estate sections!

Adam Davidson: Quality Control & Pipe Inspector