A Musing Decade

The blog will be ten years old in the autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source - and the blog has therefore, for the past 5 years or so, been called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

Observant readers will have noticed that this has been replaced by a new title – “The Bookish Explorer”. 
This is an experiment – and I hope you will not be too confused by the variety of titles you will find popping up in the next few weeks..

Why am I doing this? Simply because I want to raise the blog’s profile…

Although I was delighted when the monthly click rate rose a couple of years ago to 10,000, it has reached those dizzy heights on only 3 occasions and is currently running at half that level. I consider the blog an amazing “resource” (I will come back to that word) – on issues ranging from Brexit, administrative reform, Bulgarian and Romanian culture, Germany, the 2014 Scottish Referendum, the state (see the E-books in the top right column of the blog). But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on these subjects.....And the name indeed gives a false impression.... So I reckon the blog needs a name which better expresses its content and objectives
I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”..Not of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I have the capacity to recognize and want to pass on……

But what exactly, I hear you ask, do I mean when I say the blog is one of the longest-running “of its “kind”? Simply that the majority of blogs specialize in a particular topic - whether EC Law, literary reviews (a popular subject), economics (ditto) or Marxist economics – more popular than you think eg Michael Robert’s or Boffy’s Blog (going since 2007) which interrupts its Marxist exegesis with comment on British politics) 
Mine darts like a butterfly to a variety of flowers as I tried to explain in a post last year in the blog’s 2018 Annual – The Search for the Holy Grail. I indeed tried to argue that my claim for the reader’s attention is based on – 

- experience in an unusual variety of sectors (and countries) – each of which is closely manned with “gatekeepers”

- the compulsion (over a 50 year-period) to record the lessons of each experience in short papers

- Long and extensive reading

- A “voice” which has been honed by the necessity of speaking clearly to audiences of different nationalities and class

- intensive trawling of the internet for wide range of writing

- notes kept of the most important of those readings

- shared in hyperlinks with readers

So bear with me as I play around with the blog name – and indeed with its content..