Steve Morrisette Smooth Egg w/ Bamboo & Amberoid Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Like so many of the American pipe making greats, Steve Morrisette is a professional musician, with his instrument of choice being the drums. In fact, Morrisette is a man involved in many arts, including writing and photography. Most importantly for us, however, is that, for over 20 years, Morrisette has been a professional pipe maker, with an impressive résumé to show for it. Having been a collector of high-grade tobacco pipes, with a collection including pieces from the likes of Teddy Knudsen, Tom Eltang, Jess Chonowitsch, and Rainer Barbi, Morrisette took his first steps into crafting pipes himself in the early 2000s. Through his attendance at various American pipe shows, Morrisette would come to befriend Jeff Gracik, of J. Alan pipes, Todd Johnson, and Brad Pohlmann. Each would ultimately invite Morrisette into their respective workshops for one-on-one tutorials. Morrisette was soon well on his way to becoming a premier American pipe maker, just like his friends and mentors. In the last few years, Morrisette’s pipe making output has been significantly reduced, though the prestige these pipes carry has not.

This is the first Steve Morrisette pipe we’ve had since the collaborative piece he did with Scott Klein almost a decade ago, though it is no less impressive. There’s an old quote from Morrisette where he says something along the lines of wanting to create pipes that captivate one’s senses when being examined, but which become more or less imperceptible when being smoked, acting merely as a vessel for extracting the most flavor out of a blend (and then, once the smoke is over, returning to being an object that invites contemplation). For any philosophy majors out there, this might sound somewhat reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s distinction between “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) and “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit), though perhaps it’s simply better to say that Morrisette pipes are beautiful and ornate enough to look and feel good without these properties distracting from, or impeding, their capacity to provide for a good smoke.
This one is a wonderfully lightweight egg, making for a perfect clencher that nevertheless does not sacrifice chamber volume in being so. It’s also decked out in bird’s-eye patterns around the bowl, features two rings of polished synthetic amber inlaid in the knuckles of its bamboo shank extension, two bands of cumberland at either end of the bamboo, and a matching cumberland stem.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating. There is what looks to be a very small ding (this time not in Heidegger’s sense) on the cumberland band nearest the bowl, though it may well simply be another inlay. The pipe also comes with its original sleeve.

 

Details:

Length: 6″ / 152.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.77 / 19.55mm

Bowl Depth: 1.73″ / 43.94mm

Weight: 1.1oz / 32g