Talk:Briarworks Pipe-Story in a Nutshell: Difference between revisions

Talk:Briarworks Pipe-Story in a Nutshell (view source)

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Flatticus

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 :: --[[User:Sethile|sethile]] ([[User talk:Sethile|talk]]) 19:38, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
+Thanks for the reply, Scott, and incidentally for this great site, I'm on it daily.  And like you, I can't speak to Todd's motivation, and given the edits I won't try.  I will say I wasn't offended in any personal sense.  I more took what some see as a defense of the industry as an attack on it.  But at the end of the day, I don't think this comes from arrogance so much as a lack of knowledge about the long history of pipes from the non-pipemaker's point of view.  Yes, there have been wonderful pipes for more than a century.  But you could also buy a Wally Frank Second 75 years ago that was more putty than briar.  Fine pipe, as a smoker, but you got what $2.95 bought you.  At the same time Sixten Ivarsson was moving to Copenhagen with an elm root pipe, you could buy Dutch Mystery Pipes for a dollar.  And when Tom Eltang was making his first pipe from a kit from the Pipe-Dan shop, the hottest thing in the ads were the leather wrapped Longchamps in a bright shiny white.  I guess leather got expensive, because soon after that everything started getting painted.  There have always been pipes at every level, and many were made to appeal more to the eye than the engineer.  You won't find a point in the history of pipemaking that the people we hold up as shining examples of the craft ever out marketed or out sold Sparta or Varese.  The collectible artisans stand out because of the consumers who love them.  To my mind the story of pipemaking is a century long progression not only in the skill of the artisan, but in the tastes of the public, and it's the buying public that decides what's best, however right or wrong they may be.  At the end of the day, there has only been one way people have improved an industry they're a part of.  There's only one way people have driven competition from the scene or convinced the public it'd be foolish to shop elsewhere.  And that's by making a better product.  But I doubt there will ever be a pipe so fine that there won't be something equally frightening on the market very soon after.  Have you seen the new 3-D printed numbers?  Get ready for the future, God help us all.
+--[[User:Flatticus|Flatticus]] ([[User talk:Flatticus|talk]]) 21:13, 6 March 2015 (UTC)