The Online Network of the Pipe World: Museums, Forums, and Clubs

The online network of the pipe world is a scattered but surprisingly resilient structure made up of hundreds of independent small sites. Pipedia runs a separate link directory to keep this structure organised; the directory gathers entries ranging from museum databases to national forums, personal blogs to club pages, grouped under country headings.

Just as instructive as the directory itself are the warnings within it: a good portion of the entries carry a note that the link no longer works. The community's online memory is not as durable as one might assume.

Museums and Collection Databases

The directory's sturdiest leg is institutional collections. The Amsterdam Pipe Museum grew out of a private collection Don Duco began gathering from Amsterdam's canals in 1969, later turning into a museum. The collection, known as the Pijpenkabinet, was first exhibited in Amsterdam in 1975, moved to Leiden in 1982 to become a public institution, and settled once again in Amsterdam in 1995, in a canal house on the Prinsengracht. Today, most of the collection, which numbers in the tens of thousands of objects, can be browsed with photographs through its online database. PipePortal, which brings together the tobacco and pipe collections of European museums in a single interface, lets researchers compare meerschaum, clay, or porcelain examples from different institutions side by side. Databases of this kind are considered a primary reference for researchers, since they offer a depth of comparison that printed catalogues cannot match.