About The Knot Journal

Why this exists

The rug trade runs on asymmetry. A dealer knows where a rug was woven, roughly when, what the fibres are and what it cost them. A buyer usually knows none of that, and the available reference material is split between academic texts that assume you already know the vocabulary and retailer blogs written to sell you something.

This publication sits in the gap. It is written for someone who wants to understand what they are looking at before they spend money on it — or who already owns a rug and wants to keep it for another forty years.

How it is funded

We do not accept payment for coverage, and we do not publish sponsored guides. Where an article names a price, that price reflects observed market rates at the time of writing and is dated so you can judge how stale it is.

How we handle being wrong

Corrections are published on the article they affect rather than quietly edited in. Every guide carries a revision date, and the homepage lists what has recently changed, because on a reference site the age of a page is part of the information.

Where the trade genuinely disagrees, or where a popular explanation has no evidence behind it, we say so instead of choosing the version that reads more neatly. Rug symbolism in particular is full of confident claims with nothing underneath them.

What is here so far

The reference is planned across 78 subject areas and is being published section by section rather than all at once. 231 guides are live today. A subject only appears in the navigation once there is something real beneath it, so nothing you can click leads to an empty page.

You can see the full plan on the topics page, or get in touch if something here is wrong.