The Online Network of the Pipe World: Museums, Forums, and Clubs

The online network of the pipe world is a scattered but surprisingly resilient structure made up of hundreds of independent small sites. Pipedia runs a separate link directory to keep this structure organised; the directory gathers entries ranging from museum databases to national forums, personal blogs to club pages, grouped under country headings. Just as instructive as the directory itself are the warnings within it: a good portion of the entries carry a note that the link no longer works. The community's online memory is not as durable as one might assume.

Museums and Collection Databases

The directory's sturdiest leg is institutional collections. The Amsterdam Pipe Museum grew out of a private collection Don Duco began gathering from Amsterdam's canals in 1969, later turning into a museum. The collection, known as the Pijpenkabinet, was first exhibited in Amsterdam in 1975, moved to Leiden in 1982 to become a public institution, and settled once again in Amsterdam in 1995, in a canal house on the Prinsengracht. Today, most of the collection, which numbers in the tens of thousands of objects, can be browsed with photographs through its online database. PipePortal, which brings together the tobacco and pipe collections of European museums in a single interface, lets researchers compare meerschaum, clay, or porcelain examples from different institutions side by side. Databases of this kind are considered a primary reference for researchers, since they offer a depth of comparison that printed catalogues cannot match.

Forums, Blogs, and Clubs

The second layer is made up of environments users have built themselves. The directory lists Croatian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish forums separately; on the English side there are workshop forums focused on pipe making, collector communities, and online magazines. Blogs are mostly single-handed efforts building up brand histories or repair notes, and for that very reason form the most fragile link in the chain; once the author's interest fades, the archive disappears with it.

Club links, meanwhile, show the community's physical side. According to records, Pfeifenclub Zürich was founded in September 1972 at the Zeughauskeller restaurant in Zurich, as a branch of the Swiss pipe club. In North America, a group founded in 1993 under the name Ohio Pipe Collectors spread its membership across twenty-eight states and Canada and, in 1997, took the name North American Society of Pipe Collectors; its founding involved Phil Bradford and Regis McCafferty. The clubs' general history is covered in a separate entry: the history of pipe clubs.

Using the Directory

A directory of this kind should be read less as a list of addresses than as a map of an era. Even dead links show what kind of community existed where and when; as long as the site name and description survive, reaching the content through web archives is often still possible. For in-depth research into industrial and brand history, institutional archival sources provide firmer ground.