What a long, strange trip it's been....

Pipes on the Internet: Has availability ever been better?

Do you remember the time when if you were looking for a Castello pipe to buy then you'd either have to have a lead on where the Castello might be - or, simply call shops that you knew until you found one?

Pipes are more easily available now than they ever have been, without a doubt. Believe it or not, there was a time when finding a particular pipe was tough! It may take a year or two to find what you were looking for if there was a particular shape or finish that you wanted.

My experience in collecting pipes started in 1981. I was fortunate in that PCI Magazine started to be published during this time and a magical insert in one of those early issues stated that: "New and Presmoked Pipes from only the Finest Craftsmen...LEVIN PIPES INTERNATIONAL. YES! I would like to receive the NEXT color mailer." So I filled out the card and sent it. Lo and behold, every month or so I would receive a magical parcel from a man named Barry Levin that had high quality pictures of many high grade pipes with a price sheet that corresponded to each pipe. This was literally "pipe manna"!

There may have been other mailers in the mid 80's but Barry Levin was the first to heavily market this concept and it took off like wildfire!

You see, before PCI magazine carried this insert many of us would simply dream of seeing an old Charatan or a specific shaped Caminetto or Castello! There were not any other ways to see these pipes if they weren't at our local tobacconists (B&M's as they now refer to them online).

If one was well connected enough (and I certainly wasn't) then there did exist a coterie of collectors who knew each other and would stay in touch via letter or phone but for the most part, we unconnected pipe collectors were relegated to finding those particular pieces by less than easy methods. And the phone bills were astronomical.

Fast forward from the early 1980's to 1996: Ebay. Even before the proliferation of the many web pages dedicated to pipes, ebay was incredible for finding pipes. The first person to tip me off about ebay was Mike Hagley. To say that I was like a kid in a candy store doesn't do my amazement justice. I had never seen, in person, a Charatan Supreme or a Dunhill Magnum. And then the web pages started popping up. My first web page was text on a grey background with no pictures! Pictures (digital cameras) were just coming about (in 1996) and the first pipe pages on the internet were text with no pictures! How far we've been allowed to advance in 9 years is considerable when taken in context. I'm still a bit amazed by the whole phenomenon.

Back to the 80's - I can remember gentlemen who were obviously traveling through town who would come into our tobacco shop and say in a hushed voice, "Got any Castellos"? I didn't know about this... of course, I knew what Castello pipes were but had seen only a few! I'd ask, "What do you mean..."? The gentleman would then say something like, "Well, I know that if you have any Castellos then you probably keep them behind the counter in a drawer and save them for your best customers. So I'm asking, if you have any Castellos then I'd like to buy them".

This happened more than once. I use Castellos in this missive because this actually happened to me various times when I was in the shop! There was no internet, there was no HUGE circle of collectors that would know each other and had easy access to speak with each other regarding where a particular pipe might be. I'm not making this up.

In this environment it was very tough for collectors to find particular shapes in brands that they may collect. You may collect Sasieni 4 dot pipes.. but Lord help you if you only collected Sasieni 4 dot Canadians. You'd be extremely happy to own one or two of these pipes - and you would tell every other pipe collector that if they ran across a 4 dot Canadian then to please buy it for them.

So, condition of the pipe wasn't at a premium at this time. It was rare enough to find one, much less find a NEW one. Grain wasn't an issue (of course, good grain was a big plus!) and even original stems weren't as much of an issue. Just to find that shape in that brand was a triumph!

And then came Barry Levin. I remember getting phone calls from fellow collectors (locally) regarding Barry's mailer! "Did you see that Caminetto, #8? Man, that's a rare pipe!" Barry did very well with that mailer and one of the upsides of the mailer was that it put people in contact with each other. In addition, the PCI Magazine did a good job of hooking people up and also in promoting The Pipe Smokers Ephemeris.

Rick Hacker saw this happening and wrote a book in the mid 1980's and the whole hobby started to snowball because collectors (the masses) were finally finding out who to network with!

Prior to this there had always been a "hardcore" group of collectors. These were the Basil Sullivans, Ed Lehmans, Ken Coffelds, Portor Loring Jrs., Sam Highsmiths, Bill Bagleys, Jerry Ballards, Edsel James and many others. Countless names, I'm not even going to try and capture them all - these are the names that first came to mind. These guys all knew who collected what and they (for the most part - I'm being a bit generic here) knew how to contact each other if need be.

But for the "masses"... this was the breakthrough! And guys like Barry Levin, Bob Hamlin, Jack Ehrmantraut took this breakthrough and popularized the hobby and helped us all to get connected. Bob Hamlin was probably the first to utilize the internet so he's arguably the "father" of what we now know to be the mass availability of pipes on the internet.

Well... since Al Gore invented the internet we'll have to give him props too.