The Perfect Pipe: Celebration of the Gentle Art of Pipe Smoking (Hardcover)

unnecessary task and few would have the incentive to finish reading such a list. Really, I'm trying not to be a nit-picker. More than anything else, I suppose, I'm just perplexed. Jeffers must love pipes and pipe smoking--as I do fervently--so why not do a little better job of research? "Dan Pipe" is not a Danish firm, but German (at least all my correspondence with Holger Frickert, a co-founder of the firm, leads me to that conclusion); "PCCA" is not a club, but an internet buying service, as owner Bob Hamlin will freely admit. The most cursory glance beneath the surface of these "titles" would have lead to the truth. "Caminetto" is still in business (I bought a new one last month), though perhaps under different management, and some of the best pipe makers, such as Ser Jacopo and Ferndown are not mentioned in his list. "I can't include everything," he might say. He can and he must. And talk about advice on pipe smoking itself! No decent modern pipe

requires breaking in. My collection of several dozen pipes includes a few that required that largely outmoded practice, but they are, for the most part, cheap pipes acquired in youth (I've been at it for 40 years, now), or the odd stepchild in an otherwise quality brand. In a second edition, I hope these errors will be corrected, along with some 20 others I will not list. One last thing, from a purely personal perspective. The book has an overlay of mysticism about it that I find offensive, chiefly in the form of biblical references and that worn out saw about the magic quality of pipe smoking. Fun to talk about, but dangerous for impressionable "newbies." To include the silliness about common characteristics was almost unforgivable. Jeffers must not ever have belonged to a club? In ours, we have old and young; atheist, Jew, Baptist, and Catholic; Republican, Democrat, Marxist, and Libertarian; philosophical-minded and unthinking; happy and sad. In this, and other things, Jeffers is too much influenced by Richard Hacker, self-styled pipe guru--he quotes him often enough. Most smokers have read him--pipe books are rare and it's hard to be dismissive of even one text--but none I know respect him. The man simply doesn't know what he's talking about half the time (besides, he's moved on to cigars, his new area of expertise). Far from being the man who reintroduced the pipe to the world, he is responsible for more misinformation than anyone I can think of. Believe it or not, I wish Jeffers well. Much of pipe smoking is a matter of taste--we're all told that from the beginning. It's equally true that, for the most part, there are few absolutes in the world of pipes (no two pipesters fill their bowls the same way, it is often said), but there are a few. Certainly one of these must be the need for a high degree of accuracy in what the would-be expert puts into writing and offers the world to read.