User:JamesM

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My name is James. I figured I would make this page simply to keep track of the articles I have contributed to in any significant way.That way, readers will know who to blame.

Jokes aside, if any of the articles below do contain errors or anything of the sort, feel free to let me know. If you do not have a Pipedia account, please send any suggestions for revisions or additions to aftersixten@gmail.com.

Some autobiographical remarks

I am relatively uninteresting, but I feel somewhat compelled to write a few sentences about myself and why I have a Pipedia account in the first place.

I am an academic researcher in socio-economics, and at present I am completing a doctoral dissertation in the social sciences. I am also a pipe smoker and an amateur pipe collector. I don't know if I could call myself more than an amateur regarding the latter, having seen some of the veritable museums other collectors have amassed. But perhaps as time goes on I will be able to go semi-pro. Maybe I will add a few photos of my favorite pieces here at some point. we will see.

I enjoy reading about pipe makers and pipe history, often while I am having my evening smoke. I am especially interested in what has come to be called the 'Danish,' or 'Scandinavian,' tradition in pipe making, which carries on to this day in the shapes and styles of many artisans around the world. This interest is what brought me to Pipedia, which has aided my understanding of historical and contemporary pipe making more than any other resource (though, it should be said that there are indeed many other excellent resources, both online and in print). I myself have wanted to write about pipes for a long time, though my thoughts on the subject, coming from a place of far less experience than those who typically write these things, are likely to be comparatively short-sighted and shallow.

But I still wanted to contribute. So, instead of trying to formulate general theories or narratives about pipe making and its surrounding culture, I decided I would simply undertake the more modest endeavor of gap-filling. By this I mean researching and cataloging aspects of pipe making that are not yet documented, such as contemporary artisans who have not yet been written about on Pipedia. One does not have to be Gregory Pease or Jan Anderson to have noticed the explosion of artisan pipe making that has occurred in recent decades. While there are fewer and fewer pipe companies as the years go on, there are more individual pipe makers than ever before. There are, therefore, more pipe makers to learn about, and thus to be written about in order to facilitate this learning. It is not merely the case that there are thousands of pipe makers out there all making the same pipes, using the same techniques, either. Progress is still being made on aesthetic and technical fronts; pipe makers are experimenting with new approaches to form and new approaches to function, sometimes yielding spectacular and ingenious results. I have, therefore, been adding - where possible - articles about some of the most notable contemporary artisan pipe makers that I have come across, usually with the immense help of information provided by the artisans themselves.

Articles added/substantially revised to date:

Articles under construction

Resources

At present I use a standardized questionnaire to gather information for the creation of new Pipedia articles about individual pipe makers. A PDF version of this questionnaire, which has text boxes that can be filled out by recipients using a PDF editor (or printed out and written by hand) can be found here.

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