Linda calls Bellingham, Washington, home, but for the past three years she has been living in San Francisco. She found the invitation by a widowed friend to join her in California irresistible, as this is her home state and she loves “every region within its borders.”

Linda was born and raised in Los Angeles, but most of her family is from the Bay Area. Her grandfather, Floyd McKune, built an adobe house in San Anselmo which, she believes, still stands, the only adobe home in the area. She defines her education as “some college,” but in later years, she attended college wherever she lived: Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington State.

She has worked in the field of Japanese netsuke for 37 years. She “fell into it,” she says, in 1972 in Honolulu, when she answered an ad for a secretarial position for an art dealership that specialized in Japanese netsuke, where learned the field from the ground up. Five years later, she joined their subsidiary, which published a quarterly magazine, The International Netsuke Collectors Society Journal. It was the first publication about netsuke art in the US. Linda worked as production manager and then as editor, until the journal ceased publication in 1985.

Since 1991, Linda has been editor of a similar publication, The International Netsuke Society Journal. She says, “My job as editor is to fill the pages of the Journal every quarter with articles that I solicit, and some that come in unsolicited from scholars and collectors eager to share their latest find. I review every stage of production before each issue is published, involving the authors along the way to ensure everyone is happy before it goes to press.”

One of the biggest challenges she faces is finding new and younger writers who know about the art form and who feel confident enough to write about it. The most rewarding aspect of her job is getting to know the writers and collectors and meeting them in person at netsuke conventions, which are held every two years in various cities. “We’re like a big family growing old together,” she says. “It’s great!”

The majority of netsuke collectors are senior citizens, or at least in middle age. As the years pass, it’s important to encourage younger people to become interested in netsuke art. The internet is helping to spread the word and it makes research easier. Information and pictures are available from all over the world and may be accessed on the Society’s website: www.netsuke.org.

One of the things Linda enjoys most about living in San Francisco is that she doesn’t have to travel far to enjoy all of the diversity that The City offers within a few square miles. “If poetry is compression of thought,” she says, “Then San Francisco is compression of urban living, each compact neighborhood a world in itself, all beautifully arranged on a hilly terrain.”