By Kevin Smokler — I rarely saw my grandfather with a pipe. My mother didn't like him smoking around us kids, and he respected that. When he passed away, my family donated his pipes, thinking no one wanted them—which at the time was true. It would be three more years before a chance meeting with a friend at his favorite tobacco shop turned me, a few weeks after my 35th birthday, into a pipe smoker. “A pipe fundamentally is piece of wood with a hole and a mouthpiece stuck in it. But you are talking about an...

Stranger Than Friction: When Matches Were Dangerous, Vestas Kept Us Safe

By Ben Marks — Fire, as everyone in the Western world knows, was bestowed upon humankind by the Greek Titan Prometheus, who stole it from the god of thunderbolts and lightning, the very, very frightening Zeus. Subsequently, throughout most of recorded history—and presumably everything that came before—people organized their lives around their ability to rekindle a flickering flame, lest they suffer from cold in the winter or the digestive distress of eating too much raw meat. Author and collector Ian...

Circling the Globe With the Mid-20th Century's Most Brilliant Matchbox Art

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — It only takes a few inches of paper to conjure entire worlds: A hike in the Polish countryside; a smoke-filled Japanese jazz club; or an astronaut's view of a Russian space station. Each of these tantalizing scenes once adorned the sides of ordinary matchboxes, deftly illustrated with a few simple shapes and bright colors. Though often overlooked, vintage matchbox labels are treasures of modern design, thanks to the skills of anonymous artists who created these elegant ads that fit in the...

The Unfiltered History of Rolling Papers, Plus Tommy Chong's Big Fat Jamaican Vacation

By Ben Marks — It’s kind of ironic that Tommy Chong, the smokiest half of Cheech and Chong, is so closely associated with rolling papers. Sure the character he played on stage and in the movies was endlessly smoking fatties, and the comedy duo’s second album, “Big Bambu,” 1972, opened up like a booklet of Bambu rolling papers, with a Cheech and Chong-watermarked sheet inside. Then, in 1978, the pair was rolled into a joint for the poster advertising their film debut, “Up In Smoke.” “I’m not really a paper...

Where There's Smoke There's a Vintage Cigarette Lighter

By Maribeth Keane — At the very beginning, my interest in lighters was about the mechanism. I had my first lighter when I was 14. I saved up my nickels and dimes. I grew up in Oakland, and bought my first cigarette lighter because I thought it was way cool. I didn’t smoke and I didn’t set fire to things. I just thought the lighter was really a beautiful piece of equipment and the whole idea of being able to push down your thumb and get a flame just really caught my fancy. I was attracted to the function of...

Collecting Vintage Cigarette Lighters

By Eric Beeson — Cigarette lighter collecting is a hobby that never gets boring. Just by browsing eBay auctions for ten minutes, for example, I recently found a lighter shaped like a lion’s head, one made of jade and gold, and an electric lighter in the shape of a woman’s face that hangs on the wall. A flame we can carry in our pockets is something that we take for granted, but it was much harder to make fire in earlier times. The match wasn’t invented until about 1805, and early matches were expensive...