Peter Heding: Smooth Horn (Diamond) Tobacco Pipe

In my experience, Peter Heding can't be said to favor one type of shape, in terms of pipes that make his Diamond grade. They can be one of his most sweeping sorts of freehands, and they can be straight classics; it all comes down, simply, to how well he executed it, and how fortuitously the medium (i.e. briar) cooperated. In other words, when you see a Heding Diamond it isn't a Diamond because he thought the shape was especially novel or especially difficult, it's a Diamond because he measured it to be among his best work, in simple terms of results.

In this case, it was one of his more flourishing freehands that made the cut though, an example of what is, to my eye, his most organic variation on the Horn. He's done more novel versions of this shape-theme, one that was very stout and compressed for example, and one that played dramatically with the proportions between bowl and shank (much lighter in the former, heavier in the latter). That second example, as it happens, did also make the Diamond grade, but then so too did a straight Dublin last year — and so far as pipes we've received go, this has been the only one of its particular type (the "standard" version of this species of Horn) to wear the Diamond.

- Eric N. Squires