Antique Pipe and Briar Collecting: Two Separate Cultures

Antique pipe and briar collecting are considered two distinct pursuits, despite both being built around the same object. Because the material of the piece being collected, the way it is acquired, and the sources of knowledge consulted all differ, the two communities intersect only to a limited degree.

One text that addresses this split directly is American tobacco-history writer and collector Ben Rapaport's essay "The Great Divide: You Are What You Collect"; the author states there that he is presenting an observation open to discussion, not a proven conclusion.

The History of the Pursuit

In social-history writing, collecting tobacco objects is mostly treated within 20th-century consumer culture; that is the line taken by Matthew Hilton, who studies the history of tobacco consumption, in his contribution to Histories of Leisure (Berg, 2002), edited by Rudy Koshar. There are, however, examples showing that the habit reaches much further back. English civil engineer and antiquarian William Bragge (1823-1884) assembled around thirteen thousand pipes along with a library covering tobacco publications in nearly every language. He prepared the first list of tobacco bibliography drawn from this collection in 1874, and published the expanded, 248-page Bibliotheca Nicotiana in 1880. Part of the set Bragge left to the Birmingham public library was lost in the 1879 fire. In the 20th century, Alfred Dunhill, who published The Pipe Book in 1924, is remembered as both a manufacturer and a collector.