The Curse of Being Unoriginal

First in the news today is that I just posted some new pipes to the site - three new Morta Bettafish and one very nice Talbert Briar sandblast. I hope to have many more updates over the next week, including (finally!) some more Ligne Bretagnes. The first LBs will be a run of the "fat dwarf" shapes - the final run, in fact, since we have exhausted our supply of these stummels and once these last ones are posted, there will be no more in this shape.

In other news of things pipe-ish, someone posted an excellent article link to Alt.Smokers.Pipes the other day, and I wanted to repost it here in case anyone missed it. It isn't often that we see articles in modern media about pipes, and it's worth spreading the word.

Today's photo is a picture of my own pipe collection, which I'm not sure I have ever shown in this blog. It isn't very impressive, though it has grown a bit since this photo was taken thanks to several rejects. Prior to our move to France, I sold most of my high-grade pipes that were worth anything to raise cash for the trip, and donated a lot of the middle grades to a charity for starving pipe smokers (Yes, really). Thus, I was left with about 1/3 of my original collection. For the curious, all those little yellow tags are Christmas mailing labels for a bunch of Emily's handmade snowflake ornaments - This was taken at Christmas time, just prior to mailing out gifts.

The title of today's post refers to my recent horror at discovering how similarly pipe people apparently think. When I set up this blog and my American Pipemaker in Brittany blog, I picked these page presentations for their simplicity and style, having never seen another pipe blog in my life. In fact, when I set up this page, it was the only existing pipe blog, as far as I knew. One can imagine my embarrassment when I was looking through the blog links at FumeursdePipe and found that Stygian Smoke was already using this same format, and it predated me by a solid year (Though I have them beat for regularity of posts). On top of that, the Pipe and Tobacco Collectors Blog (of which I was, again, totally unaware) is using the same readymade setup as my other page format, the one from Pipemaker in Brittany! At least I had mine up before theirs, though... by about 20 days. So, alas, it looks like pipe people really do all think alike, or at least gravitate naturally to the same graphic designs. Now I'm really going to have to do some customizing of my pages to set them apart....