New store name on the façade

30 September 2016

After painting the façade, the entrance of our museum and shop is provided with a new name. The old but popular Smokiana pipeshop has been changed for the new name: Amsterdam Pipe Shop as a logo above the door. It is bizarre for as a museum, but this logo may not be a permanent inscription, only a temporary one. At night the text is not allowed to hang, so we remove our name in the evening to hang it back the next morning. Municipal rules are strange. There used to be a cheerful flag, nowadays flags are not allowed anymore. In a later regulation the municipality forbade the letters Pipeshop on our sign so we had to remove these. At the same time, it is allowed nowadays to put your company name is separate letters, so that façades are destroyed with countless holes without mercy. We do not find this choice an option for our historic brickwork.

Without scaffolding

21 September 2016

After four weeks of hard work the painting of all the woodwork at the front is finished. All window frames are well painted in the typical Amsterdam colors canal green and sandstone yellow. Extra task was the restoration of the two series of ridge-tiles, which are now smooth again. The museum housing may be seen again. Let the visitors come!

Cigar box labels

9 September 2016

Examples of fine printing art are the labels used to decorate wooden cigar boxes. In our museum collection an impressive range of these labels can be found, bringing back the romantic feeling about cigar smoking from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Special about these items is the incredible craftsmanship that these small lithographs show, in sparkling colors often in blind print including details in real leaf gold. To our online collection database a series of new examples have been added this month. Who wants to escape the crude everyday life can dream away in imaginary clouds of cigar smoke by looking for an endless series on www.pipemuseum.nl using the search name kistetiket. This presentation shows a dozen representative examples of these small pieces of art.