The SmokeWatcher Blog

Pipe and Pouch

PipeSmokingMan — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:49:50 +0000

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library’s large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library’s digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price, fastest delivery and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
Pipe and Pouch

The Cultivators Handbook of Natural Tobacco: Second Edition

PipeSmokingMan — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:07:27 +0000

Product Description
Native Americans believe that Tobacco is one of the most sacred gifts of the Great Spirit to his People, along with corn, beans and squash. I also believe that tobacco is a great gift of the great spirit of the natural world, and I want people who enjoy tobacco to be able to liberate themselves from the thrall of the multinational so-called “Tobacco companies,” whose products really have nothing to do with the sacred herb and are nothing more than industrialized poison. Now I’m sharing my years of experience raising natural Tobacco in what I hope is a useful, interesting and thoughtful book – The Cultivators Handbook of Natural Tobacco. As I hope you’ll come to see, the ultimate aim of this book is to make it possible for smokers to no longer be enslaved to criminal corporations for their personal supply of pure, natural tobaccos. In addition to sharing my own growing experience, I’ve reached far into the past to find tobacco growing books written by masters of the subject, from Cuba to the Philippines, from America to Brazil. In an all-new Section Two I’ve gathered together the best advice from these old-time masters regarding every aspect of Tobacco cultivation, from which varieties grow best in which soils and environments, to the carefully guarded secrets of curing and flavoring the primo leaves of this unusual plant. Also, I’ll give you an internet address where you can download all of these original, invaluable tobacco resources for free in PDF format for easy reading on your computer or any reading device.

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price, fastest delivery and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
The Cultivators Handbook of Natural Tobacco: Second Edition

Cachimbos: Marcas, Fabricantes, e Artesãos

PipeSmokingMan — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:51:56 +0000

Product Description
Original Portuguese Edition of the already classic book about smoking pipes by José Manuel Lopes. The fly leaf calls this book — Um Livro de culto, para um objecto de culto — A cult book about a cult object. In almost 1,800 entries, Cachimbos offers the reader a compendium of the pipe makers, artisans, brands, and their connections. The book is illustrated with detailed and beautiful photographs making it a work of art as much as an encyclopedia of pipes. Sr. Lopes is a Portuguese journalist, who has been a pipe collector and pipe smoker since he was 16 years old. He is a regular contributor, in various media, to pipe related discussions. Sr. Lopes frequently participates in international meetings of pipe smokers.

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price, fastest delivery and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
Cachimbos: Marcas, Fabricantes, e Artesãos

Antiquarian book: “The story of the cigarette”

PipeSmokingMan — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:42:57 +0000

Product Description
“The story of the cigarette” (1916).

Smoking, until recently, was the most popular social activity in the USA. Almost every adult, and many children, smoked incessantly. Only in recent decades did we learn the downsides of smoking. In 1916, the concern was more about how many can be made and sold. This antiquarian book covers the industry, the origins of the cigarette and smoking, and social benefits and implications of smoking.

Quite interesting book, written long before the total war of the cig industry was waged against the customers, and long before mindless anti-smoke-propaganda ditched the whole thing, incl. our healthy and mind-nurturing pipes… ;-)

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
The story of the cigarette

EstateTobaccoPipes.com is FOR SALE !

PipeSmokingMan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:54:33 +0000

Update Jan 2013: Well guys – the offer below is gone. There was quite some interest, but most just wanted to rip off as many infos as possible to start their own sites, others tried to bargain despite of my more than friendly price – *lol*. So this website is going nowhere – actually it is working better than before for me (average earnings have doubled in 2012…could have been YOUR profit…), so I guess I will just keep it. Happily smoking on – and thinking about giving the site a revamp myself. :) In case you are interested in taking over the site – please read all details below and contact me with a serious offer. Thanks!

As many of you may have noticed, there has not been a lot of change on estatetobaccopipes.com recently. That is not a bad thing in itself – the site works, you guys have a comfortable way of browsing the best estate pipe listings on Ebay, and the website has continued to silently earn me commissions.

But life is going on, I got a lot of other things to do (like building my ecovillage project, getting my coaching/self-development site up, finishing & publishing a few books… ), and I kinda feel guilty of not bringing estatetobaccopipes.com to its full potential.

So I am willing to sell the site incl. domain name, license for the script used (site is based on BANS “Build a Niche Store” and WordPress & several plugins) and all data/content to someone who can adequately administer it and further develop it.

This is a unique opportunity to tap into the wealthy and passionate pipe smokers’ and collectors’ niche – no matter if you are a pipe smoker who would just love to write about pipes and tobacco and earning a couple bags of tobacco every month, or a professional pipe buyer/seller/maker who would like to have his own advertising platform, complementing his regular activities in this market and adding a little additional (and almost “passive”) income.

Let us get into the details, shall we?

Benefits:

established site in a low competition, real-world niche (pipe sales for collectors and smokers)
Type in traffic and good search engine positioning incl. many page 1 listings on Google, Bing and Yahoo for several major brands of famous pipe makers. ALL visitors to this site are 100% FREE, I have used no paid traffic sources like AdWords, so all income from the site is pure profit (ok, domain & hosting have to be paid, but that’s all)
bunch of loyal regular visitors who have made this site their home for their pipe sales/purchases
not limited to one or two keywords, but ranking quite well for lots of combinations / long tail keywords containing “estate pipes”, “collector pipes” and combinations with brand names, e.g. “butz choquin pipes sale” (rank 4 as per today) or more generic like “estate pipes for sale” (rank 2 as per today on google.com).
has been generating constant revenue over the past 2 years already, despite my lack of care, linkbuilding and nurturing for the poor site ;-) (see below)
revenue was around 135 Euro (about $190) on average per month with several months being around 250-300 Euros from Ebay alone (with only a few hundred page views per day and PR 1!), could be easily doubled or tripled with some improvements and a bit more marketing efforts. Main source of revenue Ebay Partner Network (EPN), additionally some Amazon, a little AdSense/Chitika in the blog and some from a big tobacconist via shareasale.com

To be done (optional, of course):

maybe some fresh design, but remember you design for pipe smokers, not the “Internet Marketing” niche, so no fancy nonsense needed…
smoother integration of the WordPress blog and the auction listings part. Maybe migrate the auction part from BANS to blogpages created with WordBay or similar
more promotion and backlinking. I never felt the need to even set up a Squidoo-lens or HubPage and never did any substantial backlinking via blog comments and such. (and the site is STILL making money already for over 2 years on autopilot!) Very little effort will give you a lot of leverage to improve traffic and rankings for the site. Way easier than in some high-competition niche where you have to build 100s or 1000s of backlinks before seing any effect (if any at all….)
integrate some more revenue driving funnels, like regular tobacco reviews, and add some more background articles/relevant content.
newsletter / email-marketing. I actually had an opt-in, but never bothered to bother the subscribers with anything. Do so, and you will have even more loyal regular users, and more revenue, of course!

Why in hell would I sell this source of passive income?

I am not a typical webmarketer and only work in niches that are part of my life anyways. Apart from that I am a bit tired of the Google games etc. for any type of niche site – nothing wrong with that if you like it, but my path has been leading elsewhere over the past few years.
Focus for me in the future is on selling my own books and coaching services (self-development, sustainable alternative living) and therefor I indend to pass on my niche sites into friendly and capable hands.

Bottom line:

Absolutely a no-brainer. You get a complete, established online-business (not just a useless domain name or some polished crap site with “high income potential” on an expired high PR domain…) that is already profitable “as is” in a timeless niche that has very low competition and decent potential. estatetobaccopipes.com and the concept behind it has already proven to work – now it is up to you to bring it to the next level!
An experienced Internet marketer can beef the site up in one week so it brings in twice or more, and even a newbie could easily grow it over time just by doing a little and consistant marketing/backlinking and adding a little unique content here and there. And as a pipemaker or dealer you could boost your own sales and Ebay listings by making them “featured listings” (I’ll show you, it is super-easy with BANS) and STILL profit on other listings as well, just like now = additional stream of income PLUS more exposure for your own products/services.

So, sold? Let us see…

What you get:

Domain name of course. Registered with namecheap.com, can easily be transferred.
all files and current content (SQL dumps etc.) so you can be up and running on your own hosting in less than a day. If you need help with migrating to your server, I can assist you for a nominal fee of 50 USD until everything works like it does now, that even includes stuff like changing the Amazon affiliate links (there are many book reviews in the blog) to yours, etc..
legit BANS license included and I ~~might~~ will throw in the license for the plugin that has been posting Amazon.com reviews to the blog on its own (WPRobot). Another 150 bucks extra for you.
list of current newsletter subscribers (not too many, since I never did any email marketing, but don’t underestimate them, most seem to be professional buyers/sellers, meaning recurring revenue)
Bonus: existing backlinks / blog-button ads on several of my other sites (like elfenwald.org, PR3) will remain for 1 full year – free advertising, worth about 240 Euro alone.
Bonus 2: one pipe-related Squidoo-”lens” and two minor free blogs on WordPress.com with pipe-related subdomain, some content, and backlinks to the main site here
Bonus 3: extensive mindmap with roadmap, to-dos and content/marketing ideas that I “intended” to implement, will save you a lot of work/thinking… priceless.

And no, you will not have to sell your house (or, heaven forbid, any of your beloved pipes…) for it!

Price:

A decent price would be about 3 years worth of the average revenue, as it is common practice for websites, adding up to about 4860 Euro or around 6600 USD (depending on current exchange rate).

Considering the fact that I neglected the site a bit during the past months, I am willing to considerably reduce this price and give my baby away for as little as 2800 Euros (about 3800 USD)

NOT selling to domain grabbers, site flippers and similiar scourges of the web – only fellow pipesmokers, where I can see your dedication and feel convinced that my visitors will see a substantial benefit from you running the site in the future!

Payment via Paypal, Moneybookers or Bank Transfer (European banks only).

Offers and questions? Please contact me:
Martin Hoffmann, mh@estatetobaccopipes.com

P.S.: While the site would benefit from a technical overhaul and re-design it can be used “as is” and even a non-technical person can run it, WordPress and BANS are both super-easy to use, no coding skills or HTML knowledge required.

P.P.S.: just saw that the price for this website is lower than that for ONE exclusive collector’s pipe... LOL, well, lucky you…

P.P.P.S.: let my weird grammar and spelling not fool you. I am a German, I live in Paraguay surrounded by people who speak some weird sort of Spanish and even weirder native Guarani, and the language part of my brain is quite messed up… ;-) Does not change the fact that I am a 43 year old former product manager and chief consultant and know what I’m doing… you are not dealing with some unreliable guy from somewhere who is after a quick buck with “domain flipping”, I am selling a real (small, ok) and realistic business here, that I have built over the past years and know inside out.

Tobacco and Shamanism in South America

PipeSmokingMan — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:06:09 +0000

Product Description
“This book is a comprehensive ethnographic survey of the uses of tobacco in nearly three hundred Indian societies in South America. . . . This meticulously written book . . . is an awesome piece of scholarship which should be of interest not only to Wilbert’s fellow anthropologists but also to scholars in medicine, pharmacology, and history, especially ethnohistory.”"-Virgil J. Vogel, Ethnohistory

Note to self: been living in SA quite a while now, gotta find a Shaman who still knows about smoking. Most that I’ve met guzzle away on stupid cheap imported filter cigs… ;-)

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
Tobacco and Shamanism in South America

Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China

PipeSmokingMan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:02:54 +0000

Product Description

To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain’s most desirable trade commodity, opium — a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip of dependence. Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the “war on drugs,” which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the beginning of Chinese communism. But, as Narcotic Culture brilliantly shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition.

In a stunning historical reversal, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun tell this different story of the relationship between opium and the Chinese. They reveal that opium actually had few harmful effects on either health or longevity; in fact, it was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints preventing excessive use. Opium was even used as a medicinal panacea in China before the availability of aspirin and penicillin. But as a result of the British effort to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other psychoactive substances.

Narcotic Culture provides abundant evidence that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a “cure” that was far worse than the disease.

Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition.

Same story as with hemp and tobacco – how exploitation and anti-bad-bad-”drug”-propaganda turn a gift into a poison…

Where to buy the book? Usually you get the best price, fastest delivery and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

PipeSmokingMan — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:38:10 +0000

Product Description

Tobacco was first cultivated and enjoyed by the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, who used it for medicinal, religious, and social purposes long before the arrival of Columbus. But when Europeans began to colonize the American continents, it became something else entirely — a cultural touchstone of pleasure and success, and a coveted commodity that would transform the world economy forever. Iain Gately’s Tobacco tells the epic story of an unusual plant and its unique relationship with the history of humanity, from its obscure ancient beginnings, through its rise to global prominence, to its current embattled state today. In a lively narrative, Gately makes the case for the tobacco trade being the driving force behind the growth of the American colonies, the foundation of Dutch trading empire, the underpinning cause of the African slave trade, and the financial basis for our victory in the American Revolution. Informed and erudite, Tobacco is a vivid and provocative look into the complex history of this precious plant. “A rich, complex history … Deeply engaging and witty.” — Carmela Ciuraru, Los Angeles Times “Ambitious … informative and perceptive … Gately is an amusing writer, which is a blessing.” — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “[Gately] documents the resourcefulness with which human beings of every class, religion, race, and continent have pursued the lethal leaf.” — John Leland, The New York Times Book Review

Amazon.com Review
Iain Gately’s Tobacco is a sweeping cultural history of the world’s most prevalent addiction, and it’s probably the best book ever written on its subject. Gately begins in pre-Columbian America, where the natives made tobacco “their most popular gift to the rest of humanity,” and continues through all the cantankerous smoking litigation of the 1990s. The story touches on just about every subject imaginable: tobacco in literature, the movies, and society. It would be wrong to call Gately an advocate of smoking, but he clearly takes pleasure, for example, in noting that Hitler’s Nazis launched one of history’s most vigorous anti-smoking initiatives. The book is full of delicious trivia: Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries smoked, but there’s no evidence that the Bard himself did, and none of his plays make any mention of smoking; he “kept his writing a smoke-free zone.” Nevertheless, reports Gately with a smirk, there is “archaeological evidence proving that smoking was going on around the Shakespeare household in Stratford-upon-Avon during his life.” Smoking aficionados won’t want to miss Tobacco, and it’s a much healthier gift for them than a box of cigars. –John Miller

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010

PipeSmokingMan — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:37:21 +0000

Product Description
From the long-stemmed pipe to snuff, the water pipe, hand-rolled cigarettes, and finally, manufactured cigarettes, the history of tobacco in China is the fascinating story of a commodity that became a hallmark of modern mass consumerism. Carol Benedict follows the spread of Chinese tobacco use from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced to China from the New World, through the development of commercialized tobacco cultivation, and to the present day. Along the way, she analyzes the factors that have shaped China’s highly gendered tobacco cultures, and shows how they have evolved within a broad, comparative world-historical framework. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources–gazetteers, literati jottings (biji), Chinese materia medica, Qing poetry, modern short stories, late Qing and early Republican newspapers, travel memoirs, social surveys, advertisements, and more–Golden-Silk Smoke not only uncovers the long and dynamic history of tobacco in China but also sheds new light on global histories of fashion and consumption.

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010

Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West

PipeSmokingMan — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 01:26:05 +0000

Product Description

Why do people smoke? Taking a unique approach to this question, Jason Hughes moves beyond the usual focus on biological addiction that dominates news coverage and public health studies and invites us to reconsider how social and personal understandings of smoking crucially affect the way people experience it. Learning to Smoke examines the diverse sociological and cultural processes that have compelled people to smoke since the practice was first introduced to the West during the sixteenth century.

Hughes traces the transformations of tobacco and its use over time, from its role as a hallucinogen in Native American shamanistic ritual to its use as a prophylactic against the plague and a cure for cancer by early Europeans, and finally to the current view of smoking as a global pandemic. He then analyzes tobacco from the perspective of the individual user, exploring how its consumption relates to issues of identity and life changes. Comparing sociocultural and personal experiences, Hughes ultimately asks what the patterns of tobacco use mean for the clinical treatment of smokers and for public policy on smoking. Pointing the way, then, to a more learned and sophisticated understanding of tobacco use, this study will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of smoking and the sociology of addiction.

Where to buy? Usually you get the best price and the most professional handling at amazon.com – just click the link:
Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West