JamesM

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.

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.  

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.