Remarkable donation

29 September 2020

Remarkable donation

It is not often that a museum visitor comes to our museum and offers a pipe as a gift. Today we got a visit from a lady living in Amsterdam-Buitenveldert. She resided in Iran for a period in the late 1960s. In addition to all kinds of jewelry, she owned an antique pipe, which she came to show. It is a typical Persian utility pipe, but one with an evident age. The long wooden stem is octagonal with two bands in subtle chip carving work. The object was bought on the antique market in Tehran at the time. She generously offered the pipe to our collection. A special donation because tribal pipes with a considerable age are not easy to find nowadays.

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Artworks in wood

27 September 2020

Artworks in wood

This autumn, the beautiful magazine Métier dedicated to craft, art, materials and technology presents an article about wooden pipes by Benedict Goes. Six pages in full colour show interesting objects from our collection, some even full-page. The text not only establishes the historical connection, but also highlights the special techniques that have been applied throughout Europe, from fine carving to inlay work with silver thread. A free copy is available for our donors.

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Auction Barton

22 September 2020

Auction Barton

Although most of the famous Barton collection was already sold at auction in 2010, a new group of pipes came up for auction quite unexpectedly. A wide variety of pipes were offered in more than sixty lots, from porcelain and meerschaum to ethnographic material. As to be expected, this included numerous interesting objects for our collection. We purchased a total of twenty objects, mainly ethnographic. The masterpiece in it is a tobacco pipe from Siberia made of mammoth ivory, a rare object that we were never able to acquire. The pedigree of this specimen is particularly interesting, Barton had taken over the piece from Alfred Dunhill's collection. The pipe was considered special even a hundred years ago, and it is not without reason that it is pictured on the dust cover of Dunhill's standard work.

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Danish design in Het Parool

21 September 2020

Danish design in Het Parool

In response to the donation of the pipes smoked by politician Jos van Kemenade and our exhibition, Het Parool wrote about us again. In the column Aldus by Dylan van Eijkeren, Benedict Goes tells in five questions something about current events, in this case about the origin of the pipes of a Dutch celebrity. This immediately resulted in a number of nice reactions via facebook and watsapp and also led to some more museum visits.

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Red T-shirt campaign

19 September 2020

Red T-shirt campaign

Another good Instagram action by Amsterdam & Partners aimed at the city residents to get them to the museums. With a customized T-shirt especially for our museum, we can now take a picture to highlight the museum. After all, photos of people work better than dead objects on Instagram. See also: thuisinams uitinams hoegaathetmet museum pipemuseum amsterdampipemuseum iamsterdam maaktmokum. It doesn't really work yet, but that is understandable with the simultaneous advice to work from home as much as possible (and therefore to stay at home). Against the current, we will continue to exist for the time being and we’re open to the diehard fan.

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Smoke column turns into a museum object

18 September 2020

Smoke column turns into a museum object

In February we already reported the removal of the smoke pole or smoke column from all train stations. That has now been realized. Today the contractor delivered a beautiful copy to the museum. This donation from ProRail makes this "dirty ashtray" a symbol of an era in which cigarettes were still tolerated. That time is over, smoking is prohibited in public transport and all its premises. From now on, the smoke column will continue as a museum object, for the time being in the reserves. One time it will serve a new museum presentation.

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Exhibition Danish Design

14 September 2020

Exhibition Danish Design

Our museum's post-summer exhibition showcases modern pipe designs, including many freehands, a style that originated in Denmark. The modern pipes are characterized by an asymmetrical shape, which is difficult to reach in the rock-hard briar wood. Usually this is milled on a turning lathe to a perfectly round shape. The design pipes were all smoked by former minister Jos van Kemenade, who died last February. He had a specific preference for this Danish Design. His legacy of smoking equipment has been donated to the Amsterdam Pipe Museum, to which this original exhibition "Danish design, the choice of Jos van Kemenade" is due. On display until November 21, 2020.

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Pipe museum Oberelsbach

7 September 2020

Pipe museum Oberelsbach

Finally we could make it to a museum that has been on the bucket-list for years: the First German Tobacco Pipe Museum in Oberelsbach, a small town in the northern part of Bavaria. This local museum is as specialized as ours, it only exhibits pipes. Housed in a historic building, smoking pipes that were especially popular in that area of Germany are displayed across four halls. The interior is ultramodern, which fits well with the highly renovated interior of the building. Nice groups are the typical German porcelain pipes with paintings for soldiers, students or craftsmen.

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Tobacco Museum Bünde

6 September 2020

Tobacco Museum Bünde

Being in the neighborhood it is always a pleasure to visit the tobacco museum in the well-maintained town of Bünde. Housed in a traditional half-timbered house on the edge of the center, the museum offers a glimpse into the history of tobacco with a special focus on cigar making. As a visitor, you can open numerous drawers in the permanent display to view the depot collection. This way you find out that the collection has a considerable number of tobacco pipes and cigar holders, mainly German material but also objects from abroad. In short, a must for anyone who travels Westphalia.

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