Galleon Rusticated Freehand Sitter (44) Tobacco Pipe

The forty-five degree twist given to this freehand sitter's oblong bowl certainly lends it a finer fit to the smoker's hand. Yet some part of me likes to imagine this was Randy Wiley's way of tweaking his nose at our dubbing some of his other sitters as "drunken", by giving us something which sits up as straight as a girl at boarding school, yet sways its bowl like a common trollop. My semi-imbecilic mental meanderings aside, this is a wonderfully formed pipe, and I'm particularly fond of what I've dubbed its "snail foot" - for the way the flat section sits upon trails to one side, adding tactile variety, as well as a more organic sense of composition, by providing the pipe with its only hard edge (which is, of course, endlessly, teasingly tempting to fidget with).

- Eric N. Squires