Jason Scott

July 13, 2003

Post #1655 – 20030713

Dear Daniel:

Loved your books since I was a child, a great influence in my formative years and wellspring of endless entertainment and enlightenment, my mother loves you on NPR, yadda yadda yadda … now the important stuff: what pipe tobacco do you prefer, and what are your favorite pipes in your collection?

I would like to take this opportunity to insist that he is not encouraging impressionable young people to smoke. I enjoy encouraging impressionable adults, however.

Best wishes,

Jason Scott

Daniel replies:

I really don't smoke any more, anyway not regularly...once in a long while, I will have a cigar when I visit a friend who has good ones, and I find that if you don't smoke a pipe for weeks and months, and then have one, it tastes quite good. If you smoke another one, it tastes less good, and if you smoke one the next day, it already tastes as bad as the ones you, Jason, smoke. The great pipe tobaccos of my youth are no longer made, and the ingredients appear to be unavailable today. No matter what advertising says, there isn't anything remotely like the Balkan Sobranie you could get through the '60s. I got rid of my wonderful pipe collection, and only have a few small Wilke pipes, with poor grain and lots of flaws--they're probably Algerian briar, and were made 40 or more years ago. Pipe smoking, like bagel eating in most places, was once something delightful, and now is scarcely worth bothering with.