Ben Rapaport

Ben Rapaport is an American researcher known for a writing career spanning more than half a century, bringing together antique pipe collecting and tobacco literature. What sets him apart from the community's other collector-writers is that he looks at the pipe not merely as a smoking implement, but as an object standing at the intersection of art history, industrial history, and the history of the book.

From Collecting to Research

By his own account, he began collecting pipes in 1959; the period that truly turned this into serious collecting came while he was an American army officer stationed in Germany during the Berlin Wall crisis: the European pipes he came across in antique shops there formed the core of his later expertise. His departure from the army in 1979 shifted his focus decisively toward writing and research. As a certified personal-property appraisal specialist, he has valued pipe collections on behalf of museums and private collectors; according to his Pipedia entry, he has also served as a consultant to a tobacco and society research center at the University of Alabama since 2001.