David Milch, the writer & producer of ‘Deadwood’ and the upcoming series ‘Luck’, starring Dustin Hoffman, observed “The secret subject of any story worth telling is time, but you can never say its name”. When it comes to the art of pipe making, time is always lurking in the background; the time spent in creating the shape, hours spent sweating the details and engineering. On the describing side of the coin, we often address time when we speak of a shape as being either traditional or a new interpretation. Unlike a good tale, with a great pipe time is often a central theme, for it is often what separates the run-of-the mill briar with a true collectible.

Behold Master Carver Bengt Carlson’s signature shape, a form he calls a ‘bun’. A novel name for a form that is about as Nordic traditional as it gets, and one that Bengt states that was originally inspired by Peter Hedegaard. Small in stature, and a wee bit taller in the bowl than most of Carlson’s buns, the form of the bowl lies within that lovely event horizon where a bent apple becomes a bent tomato, and yet there is no sense of ‘straddling the fence’, quite the contrary, this briar is delightfully intuitive in its execution. Any potential sense of compositional dominance by the amazing bowl is nicely offset within the curve of the shank and nicely elongated bit. The former sports a nifty combo of straight and flame grain, with the straight continuing its run down both sides of the shank. The bit is deliciously thin and sports slotting par excellence. Master Carlson, whose sole mentor was the legendary Bo Nordh, creates less than 20 pipes a year and what few pipes see their way to the market place, usually see their way into smart collector’s homes in record time.

Bear Graves