Smooth Bent Egg (D) Tobacco Pipe

A former electrician, Max Rimensi purchased his first pipe back in 1990 and immediately fell in love with the craft. His inquisitive mind drove him to examine the pipe, a cheap Dublin, and felt he could fashion a more proficient, better engineered smoking instrument. It's safe to say the Italian artisan has succeeded, producing some of the most desirable and creative pipes in the modern era. This bent Egg is a prime example and highlights Rimensi's stylistic range, presenting a design that could easily be mistaken for a Danish piece.

The bowl rises tall and proud from out of the deep, sweeping transition, the negative space created by the transition making the bowl more visually prominent in profile. The shank subtly flares out behind, with the disc-shaped base of the stem mimicking that flare and bringing cohesion to the composition. One of my favorite aspects about this piece is how Rimensi has imbued it with asymmetry, doing so in an impressively subtle manner. The asymmetry presents itself from the smoker's perspective, where the left side of the bowl is positioned higher than the right, which slopes downward into the bowl's right flank. The grain orientation is sublime, with streaks of cross grain gracing the flanks with whorls of birdseye in between fore and aft. The mortise, then, is reinforced by a brass ring, resulting in a mount-style tenon arrangement. For a whimsical touch, the stem base features a polka dot pattern around its top and bottom, the white dots popping out against the jet-black vulcanite.