Smooth Billiard with Horn Tobacco Pipe

Brad Pohlmann is among the most exacting pipe makers that I've ever encountered. His attention to detail, his desire for precision, his constant measuring of everything, all come together to yield amazingly well executed shapes that are perfectly engineered and finished. This extraordinary straight saddle-bit billiard is an exceptional example of that. The shape, with the weight of the bowl towards the bottom rather than the middle, the clean cheeks as the shank enters the bowl and the large round shank paired with saddle-bit stem are all hallmarks of the emergent American style. This 'new wave' American aesthetic, pioneered especially by Jody Davis and Todd Johnson, and extended by Brad Pohlmann, Jeff Gracik and others, is distinct from the Danish modernism that spawned it. In many ways, it's a hint more masculine, with bigger, bolder strokes than its Danish uncle, but it retains the central principles behind the Danish approach to pipe design: clean, crisp, modernist lines with an emphasis on essentialism in shaping.

-- Sykes Wilford