Briar makers marks

24 February 2017

Like the marks on clay tobacco pipes, marks on briar pipes are also collectable. They do not origin from excavations, but can be found on flea markets or on the internet. Worldwide collectors are looking for them and try to trace the makers and their period. You might expect that everything is known of these relatively modern marks, but that is not true. Marks came into use and after a certain time they were changed for others, hence tracing back the owners is often not so easy but that is of course a part of the fun. To inspire, this album shows a series of makers marks, to illustrate their variety.

Unique donation

18 February 2017

A visitor of today was Jill Mills from Chatham, New Jersey, USA. She is a descendent of the famous pipe carver Stanley Jarka, of whom we have a wonderful set of pipes made in the 1970’s. Other members of the family have been visiting us over the years for admiring the creations of wood artist Stanley. Jill brought an envelope with some drawings, not to special but too good to throw away. It proved to be the original designs for the pipes in our museum. She could not have imagined how thrilled we were to see these drawings and decided to leave them as a donation. This fulfills a great wish to better document the background of these rare pipes.

Porcelain photographed

9 February 2017

Last two weeks we produced several hundreds of photographs of the porcelain pipe bowls, the so-called ‘German stummel’ that are on permanent display in the front room of the museum. Reason that they haven’t been digitized yet is the time-consuming work of dismantling the showcases, a job that has to be done outside the regular opening hours. So, during the early morning and late evening we took on this task, which resulted in a great series of pictures. In remounting the porcelain pipes, we took the opportunity to replace some of them for newly acquired examples, for a better composition, more logical order and more attractive over-all esthetic result.