Geiger: Sandblasted Reverse Calabash BoDog Tobacco Pipe

Once upon a time, Bo Nordh came up with a shape, a Bulldog shape. Or, at least, it's long been called a Bulldog and so now we all refer to it as a Bulldog, though, arguably, it was really a Rhodesian. Anyway, it was beautiful. Bo had a way with making beautiful shapes. There was one problem, however: the single known example of this design possessed an unfortunate engineering quirk, with the rear wall near the transition heating up something terrible. Sleek and unique as the shape was, Bo never got back to it to work the bugs out. Jan Anderson, the owner of the original, smoked it only once, then fearing that he might damage an important piece of pipe history, never again.

Fast forward to just a few years ago, and Sara Mossberg and Love Geiger received another collector's request to create their own take on Bo Nordh's orphaned, one-off concept, armed only with pipemaker Bengt Carlsson's sketch of the shape, and knowledge of the one extant original's fatal flaw. The result was, if anything, even lighter and sleeker, and more importantly featured a just-so taper to the canted chamber, solving the original's single gremlin. They called it the "Bo Dog".

And today we find they still haven't stopped fiddling around with the thing — now having gone and made a reverse-Calabash out of it. A lovely reverse-Calabash, I have to say, managing to maintain delicate and active lines, and elegant proportions from end to end — despite the considerable hurdle of having to adapt an originally slender-shanked shape into something with a cooling chamber in said shank.

- Eric N. Squires