The Pipe Companion

this book was a gift for a long time pipe smoker and he was delighted with it

I have a number of pipe books and this is by far the best I have read. It has info on how each company prepares the briar as well as how they make their pipes. If I were to have to keep but one pipe book, this is the one I would choose!

This is an informative and beautifully printed and illustrated book. Looking at the beautiful glossy photographs and reading the distinctive text is a delight, particularly when it is accompanied by smoking one of the fine pipes made by the carver you're reading about. However, I did wish that the book were comprehensive enough to fully live up to its subtitle of "A Connoisseur's Guide." I realize that to have included more the talented individuals and companies in Italy (e.g., Ascorti, Caminetto, Viprati, Tombari, Cavicchi,), Denmark (e.g., Former, Karl-Erik ), England (e, g., Charatan, Upshall), Austria (e.g., Matzhold), France (Comoy), Germany (Barbi, Becker, Mummert, Safferling) and elsewhere that are also handcrafting "high end" pipes would have made the book more expensive, but what a treasure it would have been. And given this book's subtitle, why spend precious pages describing Dr. Grabow, a company whose yearly production of machined pipes far exceeds the total output of all the artisans that are included in the book? If a subsequent edition is planned, I hope the author also thinks about consistently making his price ranges even more meaningful to the serious buyer by matching them up with the grading systems used by each carver. Even if this is not done in the text, an appendix just giving the grading systems would be most helpful.

I found this book to be a rather nice departure from the "standard" pipe tome. There was not the prerequisite history of tobacco and Sir Walter Raleigh's life story.Instead, there is an enjoyable, concise background section along with a chapter on "how to smoke a pipe" that was equally pointed and factual. The book seemed nicely non-biased and simply presented known facts about a given carver or company along with clear glossy photos (albiet of the most expensive examples) of that nameplate complete with price ranges.It is a quick read, but also a nice reference work that I have already found helpful as a quick "go to guide." It is a keeper in my small, but ever expanding library of pipe related printed media.