Editorial Policy

The promise behind the site

Publishing about antiques and period collectibles without saying how you work is asking for trust you have not earned. This is how we work.

Named writers

You can always see who wrote a page and what else they have put their name to. That traceability is deliberate, and it is why nothing here goes out unsigned.

Dorothy Hale, Founder and lead buyer. Dorothy spent fifteen years working auction rooms across the North of England before opening a dealership focused on Victorian and Edwardian pieces. She started this site because too much of what gets written about antiques either talks down to beginners or ignores them entirely.

Edmund Farr, Furniture and decorative arts writer. Edmund trained as a cabinet restorer, which gives him an angle most writers miss: he has taken apart enough pieces to know what the construction tells you about the date. He writes about period styles, joinery and how condition grading affects resale.

Sybil Townsend, Ceramics and silver specialist. Sybil grew up in a family of dealers. Her first job was cataloguing a private collection of Staffordshire figures and sterling flatware, and she has been reading marks and assessing condition ever since. She has a particular patience for pieces that arrive with no paperwork.

The drafting process

1. Draft from experience, not from a page of search results.
2. Underline every claim that rests on memory rather than a source.
3. Support it or lose it. Each underline is backed by something we can name, or it comes out.
4. A cold read by a second person catches the confident guesses the writer stopped seeing.

The money side

A minority of outbound links are commercial. None of them have ever changed a sentence that was written before the link existed.

Requests to soften a verdict are declined, and we keep them on file. More than one has become the subject of its own paragraph later.

Dates

Published means published. We do not bump dates to look active, and an edit only changes the modified date when it changes what the article actually tells you to do.

How we choose what to write

The list of what to cover writes itself from the inbox and from our own dead ends. When the same gap turns up a second or third time, it stops being a note and becomes an article.

Corrections

Corrections go to info@antiquesandperiodcollectibles.com. Include the address and the sentence. Anything factual is fixed without argument. Anything that changes what the article recommends gets a dated note underneath, so the change is visible.