Scholarship Creates Value

Our Mission

At first, I created this community because antique dealers treat hair combs as the throwaway items of estate sales. For example, as recently as Oct 9, 2011, a dealer misidentified a 17th-Century Maori masterpiece as an African comb and put it on Ebay for $9.95 with no reserve. Through social networking, we are creating an online movement to change this and get our collections exhibited in museums.

Scholarship creates value.

Joining me are 7 other authors: The Creative Museum, an online museum in France; Jessica Beauchemin, an award-wining modern maker from Quebec; Kajetan Fiedorowicz, a pioneer who aimed his collection at the tribal arts and unearthed many pieces on archeological expeditions in Central Asia; Miriam Slater, an artist and collector of Japanese combs in California; Jen Cruse from the UK, author of The Comb, one of the major books of scholarship on our passion; Gina Hellweger, an artist and collector of Chinese and tribal combs, and Susan Maxwell Schmidt, creator of Longlocks Hair Sticks.

Joining us are our readers. Without you, there is nothing. Thank you for spending time with us. Because of you, all of us are winning the battle against ignorance, as those who have devoted their lives to this art form walk in the front door of museums around the world for real-life exhibitions.

Affiliate Programs

After spending 3 hours looking at 13 internet sources to put together one paragraph on the jada naga’s mythology, I said, “Enough.” How is any community member supposed to delve further into a topic efficiently? My answer was to hand pick research myself and to draw on the scholarly experience of our authors. All of us have either read or published books.

There will be no automated program that will store your information in an atomic-bomb-blast database, analyze it by algorithm, chop it up, sell it, or do stealth marketing. I can express how I feel about what the internet has become in a three-volume novel, or I can just write BarbaraAnne Rant #6928.

The blog now has a hand-picked Resource Library with work from our authors and beyond, and we are affiliated with The British Museum, The Smithsonian Institution, and Amazon.com.

I chose Amazon because it draws inventory from a vast number of book sellers. No matter what people say about the net, academic authors who are passionate about their specialty, do the best research. They publish books. Amazon has the largest selection of books on abstruse topics such as the courtly culture of Medieval India, and the best selection of books on innovators like Rene Lalique (I had to mention Rene Lalique, didn’t I :-). They also have rare books. Copyrighted material from these sources will never appear in Internet research.

The British Museum honored the blog and chose us. With this new affiliate, we will have access to the scholarship and products derived therein from one of the greatest museums in the world. I am absolutely thrilled with this new development and how it will broaden our horizons of knowledge.

Therefore, at the end of each post, I will have a delimiter, which will be the word “comb” in Hindi. Underneath, it will say, “For more scholarly research, please examine…” This will be followed by a links to products from Amazon and The British Museum I and/or the other authors feel will give readers the best information to enter the worlds that created the combs we love.

If the work of our authors resides on another service, that will be included, too. Authors come first.

The choices of books and products are made by human beings. No automation. No databases. No statistics. No best sellers. I’m looking for the pink diamonds in the Argyle mines. :-)

I hope everyone finds the service useful.