Pie is the primary reason why rolling pins exist (despite the scores of pins that have been made for special jobs such as cracking oats, crushing crackers and cutting ravioli squares, or the artfully carved rolling embossers that are used for stamping cookies).  In the search for a flaky piecrust, there's hardly a rolling-pin material that hasn't been tried, from wood and marble to metals, ceramics, glass and plastic.  By far the most common pins are made of hardwoods, such as maple; softwoods, like pine, dent too easily and pick up little chunks of dough.  Wood, nonetheless, needs some care:  no scouring, for instance; only a thorough wash and dry, making sure to keep water out of the pin's axle.

Handy sailors carved tender sentiments or prayers on hardwood pins or fashioned whale-bone handles for them.  Such pins are rare, but m any of the simpler wood pins can be bought for as little as $20 to $30.  Although the equally unpretentious yellowware pins from New Jersey and Ohio are far from rare, they are highly collectible, and can bring as much as $1,000.

Ordinary ceramic pins are also widely available.  Harker Pottery, a 19th century Ohio company, manufactured both decorative-patterned and hollow pins.  The latter could be filled with ice water to keep pastry cool, a prerequisite for tenderness.  Today, Harker pins are beloved of collectors and cooks.  Other American pin-makers, characteristically entrepreneurial, sold advertising space on ceramic models that were offered as giveaways.  Flour mills were the usual advertisers, and yet promotional rolling pins were curiously popular with undertakers.

Unquestionably, that blank, cylindrical barrel yearned for some message, since even the blue and green bottle-glass pins that sailors brought home bore hopeful painted legends like "Be True to Me" or "Remember Me."  Most such pins were once attributed to the Nailsea bottle-glassworks, in England, but we now know that glass pins were made in other British ports, too.  (Their button handles make them seem to impractical for baking that scholars wonder whether they all were rolling pins.)  Some were filled with costly salt, to be hung--warm and dry--near a fireplace, one open end stopped with a cork.  Others held tea or flour.  It's easy to believe, though, that these glossy glass batons, spangled and flecked and striped in loopy swirls, seemed so airy, so whimsical and utterly appealing that their recipients did not really care.

Whatever their striped, printed, carved, hollow, blown or romatic history, whatever their material or function, old rolling pins are the best kind of collectible.  They are practical, beautiful and as likely to be found at garage sales and country auctions as at sophisticated antiques shows.  So hang them on your walls or arrange them in bowls.  Even roll out the crusts for a few lovely pies.  They'll taste distinctly old-fashioned.

The culinary advantage of glass pins, whether free-blown or mold-blown, is that they can be chilled, cool dough produces a tender crust. Unconventional designs--typically geared to taks other than pie-dough rolling--have extraordinary visual appeal.  American yellowware pottery pins are now among the most costly.

Some of the best wooden rolling pins that I have found were at swap meets and garage sales.  Whatever type of rolling pin you collect, you are sure to have a history in the glass, ceramic, or wooden cylindrical barrel.