Smooth Bent Egg Tobacco Pipe

While I have always had a passion of the Danish pipe, my shaping tastes have changed drastically over the years. In my youth, I fell in love with the wild freehands of the 70's and early 80's. Over the decades, my tastes became more and more conservative, and my eye started to focus on "quieter" carvers who displayed fastidious attention to detail. Today, Hans "Former" Nielsen would be a "must" on my list of "desert island" carvers, for his pipes epitomize the qualities which I seek. Indeed, if I had to select only two names for my "keeps of the Danish flame" list, I might have to go with Former and S. Bang.

Breathtaking in unity, composition and execution, while each divisible aspect of this pipe approaches a level of perfection that one would rarely encounter on this side of the vale, it would be almost unthinkable to contemplate this work on the basis of "parts". "Man, what a bowl!" or "that shank rocks", would be honest reactions if some wing-nut took a saw to this masterpiece. As a totality? Its impossible to conceive of this shank without the bowl, the bowl without the bit and the bit without the shank. While it would be irredeemably trite to say that the work before you is "far more than a sum of its parts", when considering this pipe, its easy to forget that there are parts that create that whole.

--Bear Graves