Sandblasted Bent Brandy Tobacco Pipe

Little details can mean a lot, and they tend to mean even more the simpler the form. With Benni Jorgensen, clean, simple forms rendered with skill are pretty much the main course, design-wise — and so, again, the details are very important. If your pipe's profile is dominated by a single, continuous line running from the end of the shank to the forward lip of the rim, for example, you had better make sure it is continuous, and naturally so, too.

Then there's the less obvious, like say how high a profile the stem-base bears. In this same Benni batch we find two Acorns, a Tomato, and here, a bent Brandy — and I'm not the least surprised to find that it's the Tomato and the Brandy that wear particularly low-profile stem-bases. Put simply, that's because it's the kind of detail that works better with a bowl that's full, broad, and shapely down below, tapering and becoming lighter in form up top, and a long, gently curved shank. High-profile stem? That would make the shank/stem combination look top-heavy, in a shape like this or the bent Tomato. What about a similarly long-shanked take on a broad-rimmed Acorn? This sort of low-profile stem-base would make the bowl's topside look like it was teetering the whole composition forward.

- Eric N. Squires