Where There's Smoke, There Are Buyers. (cover story)

TENNESSEE; LONDON (England); UNITED States

STROM, Charles; RAPAPORT, Ben; GOLDMAN, Mark

The article focuses on tobacciana. Pipe collector Charles Strom loves his little mermaid cheroot holder, created by legendary meerschaum carver Gustave Fischer in the early 20th century. Strom, an administrator at New York University who has a collection of some 50 top-quality meerschaums, paid $300 for this set when he acquired it last year. "These gorgeous sculptures are undervalued," he says, "because they're related to tobacco--and tobacco is politically incorrect." The little mermaid was formerly housed in the Museum of Tobacco Art& History in Nashville, Tennessee, a grand collection owned by what was once called U.S. Tobacco Co., the snuff vendor of Greenwich, Connecticut. Distancing itself as much as possible from the evils of puffing, the renamed U.S. Smokeless Tobacco shut the museum in 1998 and spat out most of its contents. Prizes like the mermaid went to a small group of buyers assembled by Ben Rapaport, a Reston, Virginia authority on tobacciana collecting and the author of five books on antique pipes and related topics. The most iconic figure in tobacco advertising was, of course, the cigar-store Indian. Mark Goldman, who runs two retail shops and a wholesale distribution center, has the largest private collection of them in the U.S. Goldman keeps 100 of these imposing sculptures in the lower Manhattan loft he built as a combo home and private display space. Collectors are now salivating to see what will become of Dunhill's famed collection in London, which used to be on display at the company's Duke Street headquarters.