Tobacco.org

• Where There's Smoke, There Are Buyers 

The public's hatred of all things tobacco is a godsend to collectors of the stuff.

Pipe collector Charles Strom loves his little mermaid cheroot holder . . .

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, Tenn., a grand collection owned by what was once called U.S. Tobacco Co., the snuff vendor of Greenwich, Conn. 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, Va. authority on tobacciana collecting and the author of five books on antique pipes and related topics. . . .

Tobacciana enthusiasts pounce whenever a museum decides to unload. In 2001 British tobacco company Gallaher Group bought Austria Tabak, at one time Austria's government-run tobacco monopoly, and decided to shrink the company's museum. Three thousand objects from a collection of 11,000 were sold at auction last year, bringing in $535,000. . . .

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.

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