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A Cautionary Tale: Researching the Paul McCobb lamp designs

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When I first became interested in Paul McCobb I did what everyone does nowadays. I looked it up on-line. Having wasted a lot of time google’ing Paul McCobb and not really finding much of substance I realized I was going to have to do more than just search the Internet if I truly wished to learn the subject. The problem with doing "research" on line is that no-one is editing the Internet. Anyone can publish anything in a webpage and no-one is checking their information. For instance: Do a Google search for "Paul McCobb lamp", and click on the very first link. This brings you to a very nicely designed and well thought out web page with examples of Paul McCobb furniture and lamps, it certainly looks official. The website is architonic.com which advertises itself as a “ Reference data base for collectors of design objects” .    Before we go much further it’s important to mention something about the way that many websites gather their content; it’s called “aggregati