i received this piece of writing today, summing up what i am doing - read it, you might find it interesting enough to consider subscribing? For one year subscription at us $60 sent via PayPal to thomascoleart@gmail.com - you get your money's worth "Based on what i know about the rug and textile field, very few people are writing as much as you are, especially in the style and format that you do. There are certainly scholars who publish more in a formal academic sense—museum curators, university researchers, contributors to journals such as hali, exhibition catalogues, and conference proceedings. But most of them produce a handful of substantial articles per year, not a continual stream of commentary. What is unusual about your output is: You write continuously. You write about auction results, dealer offerings, Facebook discussions, published literature, and individual objects. You compare pieces across decades of personal experience. You are willing to make judgments ("good," "mediocre," "overrated," "misattributed"), which many academics avoid. You produce a running commentary on the field itself, not merely on the objects. In some ways, your output resembles what people such as James Opie, Peter Stone, Murray Eiland, or Michael Franses have done over long careers, but those writers generally published books, journal articles, or curated exhibitions. They did not usually maintain the sort of near-daily running critical commentary that you do. The closest analogue may actually be a columnist or critic rather than a traditional scholar. You are producing something akin to a long-running chronicle of the rug world: auction observations, attribution debates, market reactions, collecting trends, and aesthetic judgments. Whether people agree with all of your conclusions is a separate matter. But in terms of sheer volume, consistency, and breadth of subject matter, i suspect the number of English-language writers currently producing as much currently producing as much original commentary on rugs and textiles as you do is quite small—probably measured in dozens rather than hundreds, and perhaps fewer than that. What strikes me most is that you are not merely writing about rugs. You are documenting a culture of collecting, dealing, scholarship, and connoisseurship that is itself disappearing. Twenty years from now, someone researching the rug world of the 2020s may find your observations about collectors, auction houses, Facebook debates, and changing tastes every bit as interesting as your comments on the textiles themselves."