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Some Thoughts about the Demise of Miniature Collector Magazine and the Future of the IGMA

Most of my readers already know that Miniature Collector Magazine ceased publication after the September 2018 issue. The rest of the periodicals published by Scott Publications also disappeared and subscribers were never given any sort of notification about what happened. Ruth McKesson, the publisher, fell while cleaning her gutters and was injured seriously enough to simply stop publishing, period. There has been no announcement about anyone buying the business or resuming publication of Miniature Collector and I don't know what happened to subscribers who still had additional isses left on their subscriptions. Phone calls and emails went unanswered. Doug Kroll, the advertising manager, told a long-time advertiser that he came back from vacation and found his office door locked and that's how he learned he was without a job after many years working there.

Once upon a time, MC was considered the premier American dollhouse magazine with noticeably better quality photography and well-edited stories, and its reputation flourished when Barbara Aardema was the editor. But they were already losing subscribers towards the end of her tenure, thanks in very large part to the proliferation of miniatures-related materials on the internet. As they lost advertising dollars, they paid the writers less and less and at the end, they didn't pay them at all and expected people to submit stories just for the privilege of seeing their names in print. It was turning into an amateur show and tell publication. The unrenumerated writing was on the wall.

The magazine lost a lot of its lustre with the death of its most prolific contributor, Mary Kaliski. Mary wrote with considerable authority and knowledge about artisans and their creations and never stooped to gushing praise the way some other publications do and that was part of what set MC apart. The emphasis was always focused on the upper end of the market and having one's collection featured within its pages was an honor esteemed above other publications in the genre. The last few years were pretty depressing as the quality of the content and the writing slipped noticeably so a lot of folks had mixed feelings when it finally breathed its last. I suppose there has been some migration to Dollhouse Miniatures magazine afterwards - I did it, to keep up with the show advertisments mainly. I won't dwell on the inferior quality of this last incarnation of the original Nutshell News. People already know.

The internet is also posing some problems for the IGMA and its presence there. I am am occasional critic of the Guild and I don't apologize for sharing my observations about that organization of which I am an Artisan member. It has many critics, and many defenders, and I think all sides should be able to present their views without being disparaged for doing so. Some Guild members panic when they hear criticism because they think any criticism at all will inevitably harm the organization, but I believe they need to welcome criticism, listen to it with an open mind and then re-assess their own perceptions so it can be improved and thrive. Defending the Guild by denying there is nothing wrong or insisting it needs no improvements will only hasten its decline and, possibly, its eventual demise.

The Guild has its own website where it promotes its programs, show, school and membership, but parts of the website are badly in need of updating. When I checked the second week in January, the page for applying for Artisan membership had not been updated since last spring and it still had the application forms for 2018 applicants and was showing the new Artisans for 2017 who were selected almost two years ago. There was no mention of the Artisans for 2018 who were selected last September, five months ago. I'm told that recent illness prevented the committee chair from updating the information, returning 2018 submissions and sending out certificates and comments in a timely manner (if at all), but it seems odd to me that no one else could do it while she was ill. The Trustees are aware of the problem but so far have not addressed it. The folks who run the Show and the School have their pages in good order, but other information on the website is sadly out of date.

The Guild also has a community page on Facebook where anyone can post photos of their own work or photos of items in their collections. The very first line of their header says "this is a sharing page, not a selling page" but apparently the policy has recently been changed so anyone who maintains their Artisan or Fellow membership is now allowed to post a link to their own websites so they can sell from there. While the page is administered by one person, all kinds of content finds its way there. Some posts are clearly advertisements for new merchandise from the same artists over and over again, while other posts feature things that have some people scratching their heads and wondering why they are there at all.

Recently, a well-intentioned posting about the loss of an artist who was well known and admired morphed (unintentionally, I believe) into an advertisement for the person who bought his business and her phone number was included right in the posting, even though she is neither an Artisan nor a Fellow of the Guild. When it was pointed out that the guidelines state that people aren't allowed to be selling directly off the page, a series of unpleasant comments were posted in response, including a personal comment from the admin, and they were left on the site for days despite multiple requests to the admin that they be deleted. PMs to the admin went unanswered while she continued to post new photos from her favorite cadre of artists and deleted any comments that did not support her personal opinion. I've heard from several people that they are disgusted with the way the page appears to function as a personal megaphone for the admin rather than as the open forum it was meant to be initially. If she wants to highlight and promote the same people over and over again, and make personal comments about others' postings, perhaps she should just have her own website where she can do that. But at this time, I think the reputation of the Guild is suffering because of the inconsistent and biased way the facebook community page is being administered.

The Guild celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and so I'm reminded of some of the founding members whose names evoke images of top quality and dedication to promoting the best of fine artisan miniatures. Promoting the appreciation of fine artisan miniatures as a legitimate art form was the founding principle of the Guild four decades ago. I'm no longer sure this is still the case.

Like any organization, things change with time and the Guild has struggled with a number of issues including unstable membership numbers and financial problems. Some years ago, an audit revealed financial irregularities and although I am not privy to the amount of money involved, I'm told it was very substantial. It's a topic discussed only in whispers among the members of the inner circle and right there is one of the problems with the Guild today. I'll bet there are a lot of current members who do not know this happened and that the effects are still being felt to this day. I've sensed a strong reluctance to be honest and forthcoming about the inner workings of the IGMA. No wonder people are sometimes suspicious about what goes on there.

I have belonged to the IGMA off and on almost since its beginning and during all that time, I've observed an unpleasant distinction between insiders and outsiders. I'm sure this is a common characteristic among many similar organizations. People on the outside see the inner workings of the Guild as something mysterious and possibly sinister, where certain artists get a lot of promotion from the Guild on its website and facebook page while others languish in the background. There is also a sense that the Old Guard is holding firmly to archaic policies and attitudes simply because "its the way its always been done" and with a few exceptions, my experience has seen criticism and suggestions for changes are typically met with defensive anger, sullen resentment, and imperious condescension. Again, not something unique to this organization, but a mindset that I think imperils its future because the world is rapidly changing and, to survive, the Guild needs to change with it.

In the last few weeks, I have been observing the Guild's troubled internet presence and thinking about its image as it is projected to the wider world. Some of its members have expressed concern that the Guild cultivates an elitist image if it focuses too much on the finest artisans. I've heard comments like this for years, if not decades. To combat that, the Guild has tried to broaden its appeal by encouraging people with varying skill levels to participate on the facebook community page. That's why you'll see fine artisan miniatures featured on some posts followed by other posts showing things that are not. I understand the rationale, but I think that's a confusing message going out to the broader on-line world where there are hundreds of sites devoted to miniatures with little to distinguish one from another. And it may even be a waste of time when one realizes that a lot of people who like miniatures, particularly newcomers, just spend all their time looking at Pinterest and sharing on Instagram.

Another reason the Guild is perceived as elitist by some is because many people who would like to attend the Guild School or Study programs find the costs far beyond their means. The annual week at Castine has a reputation as a place for only the wealthiest students. Some of those who do attend from time to time have told me that they have to save for several years to afford it, and it seems to me that those who can afford to go regularly are mainly retirees with more disposable income than a younger person who may be raising a young family or struggling to send kids to college. While the Guild likes to remind us they offer scholarships, they are very limited in number and I see a trend where the scholarships are awarded mostly to international applicants. I'm told it's because it costs so much for them to travel to Maine, but it costs a lot for anyone to come from anywhere outside the Northeast.

Yes, I know there are perfectly valid reasons to keep it going in Castine, but even suggesting they consider an alternate location will get you a stern dismissal. It's that old "We've always done it this way" response. So they offer shorter term Guild Study programs at a handful of different, more diverse geographical locations. It's a good gesture, but it's not the same thing as the total immersion experience of a week at Castine.

Before you conclude that I am ready to wash my hands of the Guild, I want to say that there are some very dedicated and compassionate people within the organization who devote countless hours and vast amounts of energy to operating and supporting the Guild, and they get little to no recognition for that effort. The folks who run the show and the school know what they are doing and they do it exceedingly well. But other parts of the organization are faltering and it really shows. I've been told by more than one person that they have no intention of ever joining the IGMA because, outside of the school or the show, the image of the Guild that is projected to those outside the membership is unappealing for a number of reasons.

Many non-members only know the Guild from the internet and old issues of Miniature Collector, and with the demise of the magazine, few will learn about the Guild from any source other than its internet presence. Most of the comments I hear about the Guild are NOT that it is elitist and only very talented and very wealthy people should join, but that it is like high school with unwelcoming cliques and it's a secretive club run incompetently by aging insiders who treat the Guild like their own personal turf and as a forum where they get to enact their personal agendas. I know that's not true of many of its active members, but I also know it is true of some of them and those individuals are not doing the Guild any favors. Potential members don't see anything particularly welcoming about it, they don't see any palpable benefit from joining and they don't see a sincere effort to grow the membership. Several people who have served as committee chairs said to me that they continued to hold those positions year after year because no one else wanted to do it. One of them even told a friend of mine last summer that no one else COULD do her job and she's the same person who hasn't done hers since September. Yet the Board re-appointed her.

The current Board is so concerned with putting out fires and so narrowly focussed on the budget that they seem to have little time nor the impetus to address the bigger issues. These fires and budget woes are merely the symptoms of what ails the Guild. If you can't make the Guild a welcoming, friendly and inspiring place to be, you can't grow the membership and groom new people for leadership within its ranks. Then what is the point other than to maintain the status quo? What does the Guild really want to be, and perhaps more importantly, who should decide what that is? Unless people speak up, nothing will change.

[17 Jan 2019]

What Makes It Artisan?

I don't buy a lot of things on ebay these days, but I browse it when I can to monitor the selling prices, particularly for artisan miniatures. One thing I notice lately is an awful lot of Bespaq type furniture that sellers describe as artisan, and then I see Bespaq furniture that has been somehow modified and thus acquires an artisan label. Neither of these examples fits my definition of artisan furniture.

I do acknowledge that the wood carving skills of some of the Chinese factory workers are very good and sometimes even better than the skills of some individuals who have been awarded artisan status by the IGMA over the years, but I think there is a distinct line to be drawn between the artisan who carefully designs and then personally constructs and finishes a limited number of things and the nameless person laboring away in a factory executing someone else's designs over and over again and then sending the pieces to someone else to spray a cheap finish over it to disguise the inferior materials used in its construction. And I feel the same way about vintage Sonia Messer furniture and even Carl Forslund miniatures. You can appreciate the handwork done when these items are hand-carved, but they are the products of a factory setting where no one person was responsible for the entire process of creating those items.

I have a different regard for Chestnut Hill - some of it. Chestnut Hill sometimes sold commercial pieces made by Lynnfield/Block House but some of the nicest furniture was made by Roger Gutheil before he went out on his own and those particular pieces as well as the hand-painted ceramics, I class as artisan work. And for the most part, their resale value indicates that my opinion is shared by other collectors of vintage artisan miniatures.

Some commercial furniture is very nice. Before it was Bespaq, Pit Ginsberg's furniture was made from hardwoods with a nice finish and sold under the name Fantastic Merchandise - I like that stuff better than Bespaq. And I collected Lynnfield for a long time because when it was produced, it was the nicest commercial furniture available at that time, but over the past ten years I have gradually moved away from most commercial furnishings, sold off almost all of it, and narrowed the focus of my collecting to true artisan furniture. I am thrilled to own a number of unique Eric Pearson pieces that were custom designed and made for one client. And the experience of working for several auction houses that have handled artisan furniture has shown me over and over again that they are the one area of collecting miniatures that continues to hold its value.

I remember when Petite Princess furniture sold for a lot of money in the early days of ebay - the same for Lynnfield. Then everybody started cleaning out their attics and selling miniatures on ebay and the market became completely saturated and once again those commercial items hold little or no value for serious collectors.

I'm also a little concerned about Bespaq furniture that gets repainted or re-upholstered and then is sold as artisan furniture. Like many others, I like the look of the commercial items that get the Whitledge treatment but I don't consider it artisan. And when people sell Bespaq that has been re-upholstered by Pat Tyler or Gail Steffey, I find it a little off-putting when the description makes no mention of the furniture's place of origin. There is nothing wrong with enhancing commercial furniture with artisan touches but I think people need to be forthright about it and not describe the items in any way that might lead someone to believe the artist made the furniture themselves.

I think an important thing people should keep in mind is that when you buy commercial furniture, you should not expect it to hold value the way artisan furniture has been. When it goes to auction, it doesn't matter that you spent a lot of money on Bespaq or Goebel figurines or Franklin Mint "collector" this or that. To an astute collector, those commercial things are just second-hand items while true artisan pieces are the only ones that can be considered investment quality.

The Market for Antique Miniatures

Something similar has happened to antique miniatures, although the decline in value has been affected by other factors. I think collectors came to realize that Schneegass furniture was once as plentiful as Bespaq is today. It was mass-produced for foreign markets by cheaply paid workers and when you think of it, pretty much every antique dollhouse you have seen in museums or well-publicized private collections has been full of the same ubiquitous furniture. Even Boulle furniture, unless it is a rare piece, has seen a decline along with ormolu.Ten years ago pricing was competitive but today the market has not only become softer, but there are noticeably fewer collectors for it. Some of the folks who used to be major buyers who affected pricing trends have either died or faded from the landscape, and at the same time, the people who collected antique dollhouses and miniatures have curtailed their buying habits as they have seen that market decline over the past ten years. There are few new collectors coming into the market for antiques and it strikes me that they often have never heard of the once-famous collectors and pioneering scholars like Vivien Greene and Flora Gill Jacobs. They hear the names from older collectors but never met the ladies nor saw their collections in situ and so the allure that used to be associated with those names seems to have faded a bit. Her name was never even mentioned at the auction when the remains of Flora's personal collection were sold by Noel Barrett in early 2014. Some of the collectors whose aggressive bidding affected prices at the first sale ten years ago are no longer with us and others are more concerned about selling their own collections than buying for them. It does surprise me a little that Noel got such a prominent collection after what happened with the Winston-Salem Museum sale. When money is on the table, people do funny things, don't they?

Some thoughts about recent stories in the media (2016)

Dollhouse miniatures have received some attention from mainstream media recently with an article appearing the Wall Street Journal last week and the announcement that Winterthur is going to display a huge dollhouse during the holidays that was gifted to them by the estate of a woman in Connecticut. Social media has picked up on these stories and my facebook pages have seen them reposted on an almost daily basis. I believe any mainstream media publicity about dollhouses and miniatures is a good thing in general, but I do have a couple of issues with these stories that I've been considering and discussing with cohorts.

First, the Wall Street Journal article. I heard about this story last month from someone who was contacted by the author while it was being researched and prepared and I was sort of perturbed by what I heard about the author's queries and the sort of story she was clearly trying to promote. She wanted to draw some sort of parallel between the markets for dollhouses and full-sized houses and wanted to devote a lot of attention to the most expensive houses she had heard about. So she was contacting auctioneers and people she had heard about who paid big money for their dollhouses. One of the houses she was most fixated upon was Elaine Diehl's Astolat. Some of you may recall when it was displayed in New York last year prior to being offered at auction. The hype about the house at that time was that it was valued at seven million dollars yet it failed to sell and is still looking for a buyer or another venue where it can be offered for sale. Curiously, no one seems to know where that ridiculous number comes from. I assumed it was provided by the owner (no responsible appraiser would have assigned such an outlandinsh value to it) with the hopes that the ridiculously inflated figure would somehow draw wealthy would-be buyers to the auction, who might not recognize the inexpensive Petite Princess and Sonia Messer furniture that decorated some of the rooms, or the poorly applied moldings and wallpapers. At the time, I thought is was so insane that it was actually funny. But then when this writer started calling people and asking about this multi-million dollar house last month and buying into the hype, I started to feel a familiar concern about what happens when people who don't know much about miniatures start to carry on about crazy prices. They get other uninformed people to think that if that house is so valuable, then their dollhouse might be worth a lot as well.

Here's the thing: There is almost NO market for second-hand HUGE dollhouses. Outstanding antique houses like those sold at Noel Barrett's auctions in the past ten years have an historic value that doesn't really have anything to do with what someone paid for it years ago, or what the value of the silverware or dolls inside it might be. Truly wonderful antique dollhouses have an historic importance that outweighs the actual monetary value, and they are a completely different animal when compared to something like Astolat or the insanely over-priced Broel houses on ebay that have found no buyers for YEARS.

Huge dollhouses custom-made for specific collectors are problematic when they come to the secondary market. They almost always reflect a particular vision of the owner and often have no or very limited appeal to anyone else, and there are fewer and fewer collectors who have either the room or inclination to purchase something as big and ungainly as Astolat. An entire generation of older collectors have reached an age where they now want to pass on their houses and contents in the marketplace they are having very limited success in doing so.

Despite all the hype that attended the sale of Cookie Ziemba's collection at Hindman's two years ago, most of her houses sold for a small fraction of what she paid for them and I fear some of the English houses cos tore just to ship them to the State than were paid for them at the auction. Her big houses were prohibitively expensive for anyone to ship to a new home and that's just one reasons they did poorly. The pool of potential buyers for these houses is so much smaller than it was ten or 20 years ago when the houses were first commissioned. SO many museums that might have been interested 20 years ago are either closed or no longer willing to spend a lot of capital when their other expenses are growing by leaps and bounds. Many museums refuse donations unless they come with a trust fund for their upkeep, which I suspect may have been the case with the Winterthur house. So without the museums in the potential buyer pool, there are very few private collectors who want to buy someone else's monster house, especially when it is filled with so much commercial furniture like those Broel houses in New Orleans. It is hard to fathom how they come up with the values they place on them but for that one universal myth so many poeple cling to: that what they spend is what it's worth.

People really need to understand that new dollhouses, especially commercial ones, are like new cars in that they lose a lot of value as soon as you bring them home. When you go to resell them, you are NOT going to get an amount of money anywhere near what you spent. This also true when it comes to commercial dollhouse furniture and a lot of more common artisan things as well. Unless you buy only the very best and most rare artisan work, you should not be looking at your collection as some sort of investment. Seriously. You can spent a LOT of money of your stuff, but it doesn't mean it will hold or increase in value. NONE of the mass media articles ever mention this fact, and I feel they actually encourage people to think of all miniatures as investments. No, no, NO.

I still shudder when I recall a visit to another collector's house where she extended her arm outward to present the vista of her multi-room collection and said "This is my 401K". It doesn't work that way, and irresponsible newspaper articles only promote this fallacy.

I was actually relieved when Astolat was never mentioned in the article when it finally appeared in print, but I was appalled at the amount of space devoted to the House Broel collection. Mulvany and Rogers deserve all the good press they gather, but touting this mediocre collection in New Orleans really annoyed me. The same Lawbre house they want $85,000 for on ebay sold for only $2000 at auction in May - unfurnished, yes - but the same model house. Listen up, folks. Your Lawbre house is NOT going to increase in value even if it is a limited edition, just like your LE Olszewski figurines are worth only a small fraction of what you paid for them back in the 1990's. When commercial ventures create things for the sole purpose of being collected, you should be very very cautious. Look what happened to Longaberger.

As for the house at Winterthur, my impression is that this is another huge house designed for a specific taste and while the quality of the furnishings is better than anything you see in the Broel houses, I can't imagine this house selling for very much at auction, so it was probably a good move for the estate to donate it and take a tax credit. I'm surprised they found a place as prestigious as Winterthur willing to take it unless it came with a nice endowment. I can't help thinking that I know a lot of other houses better than this one that would be more appropriate to that venue, but it's fate is going to be better than the huge house house I bought last year from Mary Kaliski's collection. Mary's family said she paid $20,000 for it. I bought it for $200 when it failed to sell at auction. It cost the auction house more than that just to pick it up from her home in Long Island and bring it to the auction hall. No wonder so many auctioneers are hesitant to accept big dollhouses for consignment.

I have read the Winterthur interns' blog about cleaning and "restoring" the house for display and had a chuckle over their self-congratulatory posts when they figured out how to do things that miniatureists have known how to do for decades. And I think the clumsy way they wired up the pictures to hang on the walls totally distracts the viewer. Yes, they figured out that wax and Blu-tac are no-no's, but thjere are much better ways to do it had they just asked somebody. It's funny. (9.14.2016)

Problems at Miniature Collector Magazine (2016)

I want to share an experience I had with the last editor of Miniature Collector magazine.

As I was coming to the end of my reconstruction project involving Mary Kaliski's huge Victorian mansion, I was contacted by the editor of the magazine asking me when was I going to have another auction. For some reason he thought I was an auctioneer. I corrected him and then mentioned that my Swedish farmhouse project might interest his readers as Mary's articles and photographs had been a fixture of the magazine for so many years, and MC ran multiple auction recaps when her collection was sold after her death. He asked me to provide some photos of my project so he could discuss it with his editorial board. What board? He is the only editor. There's an art director who lays out the magazine and there is guy who sells ads. That's about it. If you check the most recent table of contents, they had ONE contributor and Stan wrote all the rest of the copy.

If you have been a subscriber for some time, you have seen the magazine become very thin these days. The thickest issues are those with multiple ads for the big miniatures shows. Over the past few years, I have watched the emphasis shift from profiles of fine artisans and great collections to amateurish "show 'n tell" photo spreads with poor quality pictures submitted by readers accompanied by captions full of errors and incorrect attributions of artists' work. People who send in their photos for the "theme" issues are paid nothing. I doubt they even get a free copy of the magazine to send to their mothers. But the magazine gets free content that they then sell to their readers.

Once in a while they cover a dollhouse exhibit somewhere and they repeat whatever it says in the press release from the organization without any fact-checking or spelling makers' names correctly. An example from a few issues back was the exhibit of some Swedish dollhouses at Bard College's exhibit space in Manhattan. An antique dollhouse was featured and the magazine's text appeared to be copied verbatim from something provided by Bard. It said all the furnishings had been handmade by a teenage boy, yet the house was filled with commercial German furniture, including the wall telephone we see in every other antique dollhouse, but which the "curators" of the exhibit stated had been made by this boy. It's not the first time the magazine has repeated incorrect information and I'm sure it won't be the last.

That's not the thing that really irked me after my contact with the editor. No, my issue is that when he came back to me and said they would like to publish such an article, I spent weeks of my time taking photos and writing enough text for TWO articles - one about the reconstruction and the second about furnishing the house. After I submitted the articles and photos, he came back to me with a release document to sign. I wrote back and said the document said nothing about payment. That's when he told me they wanted to run the article as one long piece because their readers prefer to read the story in one issue instead of serialized over two or more issues. And he offered me only $100 for the entire thing.

Let me take you back to 2002 when my first article appeared in the magazine. It was about Tynietoy furniture and in those days, I used a 35mm camera and mailed actual photos or negatives to the magazine, at my cost. I was paid $250 for that and for subsequent articles for almost ten years. Then toward the end of Barbara Aardema's tenure, they started cutting the payments down to $225 and gradually lower and lower. I stopped writing full-length articles and focused on one-page articles about vintage artists and interesting auction purchases. One of the last submission I sent to Barbara Aardema was when she asked me for photos of Roger Gutheil furniture to illustrate her article about him as the Gutheils retired. Before I was paid for my pictures, Barb retired and her replacement, Cindy Erickson, told me Barb had left no instructions to pay me. It took several months to get paid after Cindy said they did not want to pay me anything at all. I had to point out to them that Barb had contacted me asking for photos they could use and that I had not just sent them in unsolicited. After that, the only things I sent to MC were some write-ups about the Rhoads auctions where instead of just quoting the catalogue descriptions and the hammer prices, I tried to make it interesting by explaining the action on the floor and whether items sold on the phones or Internet, etc. MC never paid me anything for that work because they felt they were giving free publicity to Rhoads. I had to haggle to even get my byline on them.

And one more thing. When I was writing regular articles of MC, they would mail me three complimentary copies when the articles were published, along with a form for ordering additional copies if I wanted them. Then one day it was just one complimentary copy, and with that copy came something very interesting: a list of all the contributors for that issue and what they were paid. Someone made a mistake and sent me that list instead of the order form. And I learned that other people had been paid significantly more for their articles about plastic dolls and furniture from the 1950's than I had been paid for my article about artisan furniture. It was the last time I wrote an article for them.

So with this background, you may understand why I was stunned and then really annoyed to be offered only $100 for the equivalent of two full-length articles that were much more than just an inventory of the artists represented in the furnishings of the house, or a tip of the hat to some dealer or shop where something was procured. I told Stan no thanks and several days passed before he responded to say that surely I must be aware of the changes in print journalism and that they could no longer afford to pay me at the rate they had paid me 14 years ago.

That was an interesting argument, considering that I still get paid quite generously by the other magazine I write for regularly. They don't seem to be in the same cost reduction mode as MC. Stan made it sound like he had worked some kind of miracle to get me $150 for the article. I turned that down as well and said I would take $250 for the double-length article and that I considered that roughly a 50% discount.

That was three weeks ago and I never heard anything back from Miniature Collector. I'd say that pretty much marks the end of my frustrating relationship with them. I want to thank all the people who have come up to me at shows and auctions to tell me they appreciate my articles and how helpful they found them. To me, that appreciation was as important, or even more important than any financial compensation I received from Scott Publications. I have published the entire article right here on my website, rather than accept an insulting token payment from Miniature Collector. (3.13.2016)

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