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The second car I owned was a 1967 Chrysler Newport. Though Chrysler was very much a luxury marque back then (no minivans, and their cars came in one size: full-size), the luxurious features on mine began and ended with a vinyl top. It was a four-door, translating it into a collector value of, roughly estimated, zilch. And I loved it. I drove that thing, sans AC, sans disc brakes, sans powerbrakes, rolling perilously through corners, and powered by 383 breathing through a two-barrel carburetor (and doing so much more efficiently after the bird's nest that was there when I bought the car was removed, I'll have you know) for just shy of ten years. It was eighteen feet and four inches of beige and black, fast off the line, improbable in the corners, impossible to stop on a dime, and worth less than its weight in steel at auction... and I still look back at it with fondness. It was nothing special, except to me, and to those friends reckless enough with their mortal flesh to ride in it as passengers.
My first car, for the record, was 1969 Camaro, a car worth a small fortune to collectors now. It was fast and loud and shiny blue, every idiot teenager's dream -- and I didn't shed a tear to see it go. It just wasn't for me, it made too many police officers look in my direction, and the ride let you know the exact depth and shape of every ill-advised repair (or disrepair) to New Jersey's countless roadways, highways, broadways, streets and alleys. God bless whoever it was that took it off my hands: better him than me.
And here, now, many years later, I find myself recognizing much the same attitude amongst my fellows in the world of pipes. The pipes they won't part with aren't necessarily their priciest, the pipes they most regret parting with weren't necessarily the rarest finds, and the pipes I most frequently see them sticking in their mouths aren't necessarily the most finely grained or beautifully finished. I'm not doing things much differently, either: two out of the three pipes you'll see me smoking ninety-nine times out of a hundred were rescues from the "pipe science box", an old 1970s Dunhill of a shape no longer in production, and an S.T. Dupont Canadian someone over-bored the draft-hole on.
This is fine; this is good -- a man should know what he wants out of life, pipes included. If collecting briars that push the boundary between smoking instrument and work of art is your thing, good. I'm glad someone is doing it, just like I'm glad there are people out there preserving, and occasionally showing off, Duesenbergs, Delages, and Ferraris that are now worth more than many a house. (Especially when they show them off; it gives the rest of us a chance to see with our own eyes something we may only recognize from photographs, and may never get to behold in person again.) Likewise, if your favorite briar in all the world is a rusticated Peterson System pipe that you've spent twenty years dropping, dinging, sitting on, and perhaps occasionally setting a-fire, handed down to you from a great-uncle so-and-so who did the same to it before you, this, too, is good. It's your pipe, it's your smoke, and you're the one who has to enjoy it. Peterson should pay you to be in advertisements; there is, after all, no crucible of destructive testing quite like time spent in the real world. (This, of course, brings us back to precisely why the prudent collector of irreplaceable creations does their best to keep what they collect out of it, excepting special occasions.)
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