The man who reads tiles like other people read books.
From New York City, Gregg Swain has turned the study of old mahjong tiles into something close to scholarship. He is a coauthor of Mah Jongg: The Art of the Game, the volume that taught collectors to see a tile as an object of art and history, and he wrote American Mah Jongg for Everyone with the teacher Toby Salk. His site, Mahjong Treasures, reads less like a shop than a museum with the lights left on.
Prim featured him in an issue about fakes, because the surest defense against a counterfeit is intimacy with the real thing. He can tell you what a carving means and which decade a case belongs to. He is generous with it, too: well over a hundred talks on the art and history of the game, and an open invitation to collectors to send him photographs of the unusual and the unexplained.
Written from what the letter said. Read the letter for the whole of it.