Pijpenkabinet (The Pipe Museum)

My first full day of a four-day weekend, full of anticipation of our good friend’s arrival from home, started with his email explaining why he missed the trans-Atlantic flight. Even a good reason like dangerous weather isn’t enough to mask the disappointment when the anticipation was so very high to start. After an exchange of early morning emails and time to think about how to adjust the already-full agenda we planned for him, the important task of planning our day was next.

Instead of repeating any of the things we love doing here, we looked at the museums we’ve ignored to date. Enter the Pijpenkabinet. It seems like the Fun Police should track anyone who even considers a museum dedicated to something as vilified as smoking, but after a tiny bit of research, we risked it.

Located on the Prinsengracht, the fourth and longest of Amsterdam’s canals, the Pipe Museum is in a canal house, and is only one of many, many examples of classic Dutch architecture along “the Prince’s Canal” (named when it was dug in the 17^th century for Prince William of Orange.). Like every self-respecting, unapologetic museum, the entrance is through the gift shop, which is below street level, where many years before domestic personnel in service to the family would have entered. The museum itself is the ground floor of the house, room enough to display only about 6% of the total collection, roughly 2,000 of the 30,000 artifacts related to tobacco and pipe smoking through the ages! The collection, first begun in 1969, and the subsequent museum are the results of the passion of one man, Don Duco.

 

Estimated 650 b.c. 

The oldest pipe in Duco’s collection is pre-Columbian, estimated as old as 650 b.c.  With artifacts displayed chronologically the museum features all the usual suspects such as native North American “peace pipes” (and even “war pipes”), countless clay and ceramic pipes from various European cultures, ceremonial African pipes, and Middle Eastern and Asian opium pipes. Speaking of those, we were told that the invention of the opium “dream stick” in the 1700’s is directly responsible for the subsequent addiction of some seventy million people. The easily recognizable opium pipe allows the user to vaporize instead of burn the opium, which exponentially increases the intoxicating and addictive properties of the drug.

Opium pipe

Although Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with (or blamed for) bringing tobacco to Europe from the new world, it was John Rolfe, a Jamestown settler, who, in 1609, first successfully cultivated “brown gold” for commercial use. By the Dutch “Golden Age” of the 17^th century virtually every man of any social standing smoked tobacco, using clay pipes (with the length of the pipe stem as visual evidence of greater social status. Yep, size mattered.)

Looks like you would need help just lighting this one!

The decline in the popularity of pipe smoking was directly attributable to the increasing popularity of the handheld cigarette. (Of note, the French invention of the cigarette rolling machine in 1880 increased daily production—and availability—of cigarettes from approximately 4,000 units per day to 4,000,000.)

(pictured above: hand-crafted French pipe bowls; ornate Dutch clay pipes)

With only one way in and one way out, before I left I found myself searching the many rows of pipes for sale—while trying my best to remember that I don’t smoke a pipe­. I couldn’t help thinking that our friend’s misfortune had a silver lining after all.