Turkmen Carpets: From Bukhara To The Black Desert

BUKHARA, Dec. 17, 2011 – When the "red rugs of Central Asia" first arrived in Western Europe in the mid-to-late 1800s, nobody knew much about where they came from.

They trickled out through the Russian Empire and bore an exotic name: Bokhara carpets. But apart from the fact Bokhara (today Bukhara in Uzbekistan) was a legendary city on the Silk Road, the name gave no hints of the rugs' origins.

Another name commonly used in Victorian England for the carpets told even less: "Gentlemen's Carpets." They were called that because they particularly appealed to men as furnishings for dens and studies.

It took until our present day before people widely realized that the red rugs' only relation with Bukhara was that the city's bazaars were the collection point for sending them to Western markets. And that, in fact, the carpets were woven by a specific people that mostly live far away from Bukhara: the Turkmen.

The Turkmen who sent their carpets to the bazaar inhabit a vast expanse of arid land between the Amu Darya river and the Caspian Sea that mostly is made up of the Kara Kum Desert, or "Black Sand" Desert. Today, much of that land is the country of Turkmenistan, but there are also populations of Turkmen living across the borders of Iran and Afghanistan.

Traditionally, the Turkmen were both a nomadic and settled people, largely depending on how much water was available. They wove everything needed for a nomadic lifestyle but also wove many of the same items when residing in towns and villages.

Here is a picture of a nomadic Turkmen family posing on a carpet outside their felt yurt. It was taken by the Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in the early 1900s when Turkmenistan was part of the Russian Empire.

When the Turkmen arrived in the region is uncertain, but they were part of a vast migration of Turkic peoples who moved into the Caspian area, northern Iran and Anatolia around 1,000 AD. Their language belongs to the same family of languages – Oghuz Turk – as those spoken in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and by the Turkic tribes of Iran.

It is often said that to like Turkmen carpets, one must like the color red. And that is true. Early Turkmen carpets are all dyed in shades of red taken from the madder plant and the shades vary from brick-colored to a dark purple brown. Usually, the other color in the carpets is black.

But if this traditional color palette seems limited, the effects achieved are both striking and subtle. And part of the reason is that the colors heighten, rather than compete with, the carpets' decorative pattern of mysterious tribal "guls."

The guls, the Persian and Turkmen word for flower, are usually octagonal forms that are quartered and placed in rows. Often a large gul will alternate with a subsidiary one, as in this photo of guls in a main carpet woven by the Tekke tribe.

Here the main gul is a variation of a type of gul known as a "gulli (or gushly) gul." The capet is available from Knights Antiques in Britain.

The world of Turkmen carpets is a world of guls and guls themselves are part of the common artistic heritage of the Silk Roads. Historically, guls (known as "rosettes" is Western art history) are found in silk fabrics made by civilizations up and down the length of the road, from the Chinese to the Soghdians, to the Sassanians to the Byzantines.

But just what the Turkmen guls represent is not certain.

According to the Turkmen themselves, they symbolize birds or parts of birds. But the way some guls are used more than others by different Turkmen tribes has long created a debate among Western rug experts over whether they also serve as identifying totems for the tribes that weave them. Research is still needed to answer the question.

Often, Turkmen carpets include both large guls and subsidiary guls arranged in an endless repeat pattern. The arrangement creates an optical illusion in which the eye connects the large guls into one pattern of compartments and the small guls into another, so the two patterns appear to be overlying.

The "double-compartment" pattern is visible in this carpet woven by the Yomut tribe. The large guls are variation of a type of gul known as a "tauk nuska gul." The capet is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The double-compartment pattern may be another fascinating link between Turkmen carpets and the ancient Silk Road trading routes. The design, using various kinds of elements, has been found across the ancient world, from Chinese textiles to ceiling drawings in Egyptian tombs.

Today, Turkmen carpets are well known to rug collectors and the early generic names like "Bokhara" are less and less used. But finding a new way to name them has proved difficult because, unlike most rugs, they cannot be reliably named after specific geographical regions where they were woven.

Turkmen tribes were historically so mobile -- claiming and abandoning territories as their neighbor's lost or gained strength -- that it makes more sense to name the carpets after the tribes which wove them rather than the tribe's location at the time.

Here is a map of Central Asia showing the Turkmen's homeland, which includes parts of northeastern Iran and northwestern Afghanistan.

The effects of the Turkmen's mobility can be seen in some of the tribes' rugs. The guls of the Yomut (or Yomud) tribe which had long contact with Persia (and which mostly lives in northeastern Iran today) are believed to show adaptations of complex Persian floral forms.

An example can be seen in the photo at the top of this page of a Yomut carpet with kepsi guls. The carpet is available from James Cohen in Milan.

Over the centuries, as more and more Tukmen moved from nomadism to settled life, the carpets of the tribes which settled underwent more changes than those which stayed nomadic.

One of the earliest tribes to settle appears to have been the Chodor. The designs of main their carpets more varied than those of the other tribes and use more colors.

Here is an example of a Chodor carpet with ertmen guls. It is available from Joshua Lumley near London.

In the case of many nomadic groups elsewhere in the world, settling has meant a loss of weaving traditions.

But in the Turkmen case, settled women maintained their weaving traditions as a way to supplement their family income. Over time the volume of rugs they produced far outpaced those woven by their nomadic sisters.

Thus the rugs of the Saryk, which remained nomadic longer than any other Turkmen tribe, until the end of the 19th century, are considerably rarer than those of other groups.

Another tribe whose rugs are rare is the Salor – but for a different reason. The Salor, long considered among the oldest of the Turkmen tribes, disappeared at some time in the 19th century, leaving behind their weavings as their only legacy.

At what point the weavings of settled Turkmen tribe turned into a major regional business sensitive to the changing tastes of buyers is unclear.

But by the time the traditional red rugs came to the attention of Western enthusiasts, there was already production of another class of Turkmen carpets – not traditional at all – which were aimed at the sophisticated tastes of urban centers such as Bukhara, Samarkand, and far beyond.

These rugs were the so-called "Beshir" carpets, named not after a tribe but one of the towns where they were woven along the Amu Darya river, which flows between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Here is a Beshir carpet available from Knights Antiques in Britain. Some other Beshir carpets show the influence of popular ikat designs taken from Central Asia's vibrant textile industry of the same time.

Exactly who wove the Beshir carpets is unclear, because historically these towns were home to a mixed population of Turkmens from different tribes and even indigenous Iranian people who pre-dated the Turkic conquest of Central Asia.

But if Beshir carpets show how Turkmen weavers could adapt to market tastes, the more remarkable thing about Turkmen carpets overall remains how much they have remained true to tradition over the centuries.

An example among many are the carpets woven the Ersari tribe, which has been mostly sedentary since 17th c. Their large carpets are too big for a yurt, so they were clearly made for urban buyers, but their designs stayed traditional.

As experts Robert Pinner and Murray L. Eiland, Jr. note in their 1999 book 'Between the Black Desert and the Red: Turkmen Carpets from the Widersperg Collection':

"The same gols have been used from the pre-commercial into the commercial period and the designs have changed little … The number of colors has tended to decline from the six or nine colors used in earlier rugs to sometimes only three or four in later rugs, (but) the guls will be drawn in a strikingly similar manner."

Here is modern Ersari carpet with another of the many variations of the gulli gul. It is available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco.

Traditionally, Turkmen weavers not only produced main carpets for the floors of yurts but also carpet-like hangings to cover the yurt doorway (ensi), bags of different types and sizes for storage and transport (chuvals and torbas), decorative trappings used in wedding rituals (azmylik), tent bands and tent pole covers. Many of these smaller weavings show more variations in design than do the carpets.

Perhaps due to this variety, Turkmen weavings of all kinds are today highly popular with collectors. According to Pinner and Eiland, there are more Turkmen weavings in private rug collections in the US and Germany – the two countries with the largest number of private rug collections in the world -- than rugs from anywhere else.

That's a long way for Turkmen rugs to have traveled from the days when they were simply all lumped together on Western markets as Red Rugs, Bokharas, or Gentlemen's Carpets.

And it is a tribute to the weavers' skills that today their work has not just put the Turkmen people on the world's art map, but even the names of their own individual tribes.

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Russia And The Red Rugs Of Central Asia

MOSCOW, Sept. 15, 2011 -- Central Asian carpets came to attention of Europeans in the mid-1800s largely as a result of the Russian Empire's expansion into the region.

The expansion took place in a dramatic reversal of the previous order.

For centuries, Russians had lived in the shadows of the Turkic and Mongol empires that dominated Eurasia. From 1223 to 1480, neighboring Tatars held such direct sway over Russia's principalities that Russians call it the time of the "Tatar yoke."

And for centuries more, nomads so regularly raided Russia and Eastern Europe for slaves that the word "slave" itself derives from "Slav" in many European languages.

But gunpowder gradually neutralized the advantages of the horse borne warriors.

As Robert B. Golden notes in his book Central Asia in World History (2011), nomads were no longer able to take cities fortified with canons by the late 1400s. By the mid-1600s, the infantryman's flintlock musket had become a match for the nomad cavalryman's composite bow.

Then it was Russia's turn to expand across the steppes, starting in the mid-1500s under Ivan IV the Terrible. By the time the Russian Empire reached the Silk Road cities of Central Asia in the late 1800s, it is was an unstoppable industrializing power that had helped defeat Napoleon and recently annexed the Caucasus.

Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand fell to the Russian Empire like dominos, captured in 1865, 1867, and 1868, respectively. Above is a picture of the battle for Samarkand.

The cities fell quickly because, by the 1800s Central Asia had declined into an impoverished region of settled and nomadic peoples steeped in tradition. The trans-continental Silk Road trading routes had been undercut by the sea trade and the wealth and vision they once generated were gone.

But some tribes put up a fierce resistance. At the battle of Geok Tepe ("Green Hill" in Turkmen) in 1882, some 25,000 Turkmen held out in a fortress for 23 days against a far better armed Russian force of 6,000. Finally, the walls were mined and the fortress was taken by storm.

Here is a photo of Turkmen soldiers in chain mail and armed with antiquated muskets.

In the wake of Moscow's conquests, the famous red carpets of Central Asia, known in the West but rarely seen in abundance, came flooding onto the Russian market.

One American observer, New York Herald correspondent Januarius MacGahan, witnessed the surrender of the city of Khiva to the Russian Army. He reported that families were forced to sell their carpets and other belongings to traders in order to pay tributes levied upon the defeated tribes:

"The Turcoman carpets, too, were very much in demand, and sold readily, in spite of the high prices demanded for them and of the fact that hundreds had been "looted" in the campaign against the Yomuds. A carpet, four yards long by two wide, brought 4 to 5 (pounds).

He added:

"A curious feature of the sale was, that although the Turcomans must have been hard pressed for money to pay the indemnity, they could not be induced to lower their prices a single kopek. They simply named their price, and you might take the article or leave it, as you pleased."

Here is a photo of a Turkmen woman standing on a carpet she has woven before her yurt. The photograph is by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who traveled throughout the Russian Empire in the early 1900s and was a pioneer of color photography.

The Russian conquest of Central Asia came at the height of the scramble by European powers for colonies worldwide and Moscow's occupation of the region followed the model of the times.

Despite the fact the territory was part of the Russian Empire, its peoples were designated "inorodtsy", or aliens. They were subjects but not citizens of Russia.

And unlike other ethnically non-Russian subjects, they could not be drafted into the Imperial Russian army, where they might acquire knowledge of modern warfare and weaponry. That was, perhaps, in memory of the past days of the Tatar yoke.

Of course, there was mass colonization, too, with ethnic Russians moving into the region, particularly to Kazakhstan, starting in the 1890s,.

Still, while Central Asia was treated very much as a colony, Moscow was interested in learning more about both its economic potential and its peoples. So, Russian academic teams fanned out along with colonial administrators.

The work of some of these teams helped lay the foundations of the West's enduring fascination with Central Asian rugs today – both as art and history.

In 1901 and 1902, Samuil Martynovich Dudin, already a well-known amateur specialist in Oriental Art, led two trips to collect materials and photographs for the first Central Asian collection of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. He brought back an enormous number of objects (2,526), including 350 rugs and carpets.

Here is one of Dudin's photographs, showing a bazaar in Central Asia.

Dudin's rug collection, which exists intact today, included Uzbek, Kirghiz, Baluch, and Afghan rugs. But most were Turkmen pieces because he considered the Turkmen to be the best carpet weavers in the world. He explained why in his travel notes:

"This quality of Turkmen rugs, in addition to other reasons, can be explained by the fact that all items are used, aside from their practical function, as decoration for the yurts. When put on camels during migrations and wedding ceremonies, they served as publicity for the family, visual evidence of the weavers' skill, the brides and wives.

He concluded:

"It was the competition of the inhabitants of various yurts that created the superb examples of carpet craftsmanship which one admires in one's travel on the Turkmen steppes and in local carpet shops.”

This picture of a Turkmen family seated in its yurt and surrounded by textile items was taken by Prokudin-Gorsky in the early 1900s.

But if Russians appreciated Central Asian carpets and, helped funnel them to Western Europe, the increased interest had a devastating effect on traditional carpet weaving itself.

By 1898, the ancient Silk Road cities were linked by rail to Russia proper via a western line to the Caspian and, by 1906, via a northern line to Orenburg (on modern Russia's Kazakh border). Commercialization of the weaving craft accelerated with the pace of exports.

Rug researcher Richard Wright notes that "from about 1900, functionaries were worrying about weavers' movement away from traditional designs."

To support traditional handicrafts, administrators introduced the "kustar" (or "artisan") program in Central Asia just as elsewhere in the Empire. The program, which distributed traditional designs to weavers and organized promotional exhibitions, was intended to help peasants supplement their livelihood by producing and selling quality handicrafts. But often it had the effect of simply fanning commercialism further.

The decline in quality continued. By 1903, says Wright, official reports were complaining of the "recent use" of synthetic dyes instead of natural ones and of "hasty work." By the end of the first decade of 20th century there were complaints that it was difficult to see sharp outlines in “new” rugs.

Then, far greater threats to tradition arrived.

The Russian Revolution brought communism to Central Asia and the drive to industrialize. Thousands of weavers were "collectivized" into state-run manufactories where, aided by machines, they churned out endless meters of cheap carpeting for public halls across the Soviet Union.

Those weavers who still created carpets at home found their ability to maintain the quality of their work and sell it severely limited. The Soviets' initial maintenance of the kustar program gave way to state neglect, good materials were hard to get, and the free-market was banned.

Here is a rare example of museum-quality weaving in the Soviet era: a portrait carpet of Lenin. It may have been specially commissioned for a meeting hall, mausoleum, or the private villa of a powerful party boss.

Yet if overall the weaving of the once-famous red carpets of Central Asia sank abysmally, there was one saving grace in the story. Ironically, it was the ability of Turkmens who had fled Moscow's control to continue their tradition of fine weaving and even pioneer a return to natural dyes.

As Robert Pinner & Murray L. Eiland, Jr, note in their 1999 book Between the Black Desert and the Red – Turkmen Carpets from the Wiedersperg Collection, "many Turkmen groups migrated to northern Afghanistan for religious reasons" when the Russian Empire conquered Central Asia. And later, "around the time of the Russian revolution there were more tribal movements toward the south."

In northern Afghanistan, the new arrivals joined fellow Turkmen who had been living and weaving there for centuries. Their weavings found their way West via Kabul and, later -- when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and many weavers fled south to Pakistan -- via the rug bazaars of Peshawar.

Today, with the independence of the Central Asian states since 1991, there are hopes that fine carpet weaving will revive, particularly in Turkmenistan. But progress is slow, despite the Turkmen government's opening of a carpet museum in the capital in 1994 and injunctions to producers to return to natural dyes.

Still, there is no reason to doubt a renaissance will come, or to doubt Central Asia's ties to its carpet heritage. By no coincidence, the flag of independent Turkmenistan is also a showcase of the 'guls' most commonly used by the country's five major tribes in their carpet weaving. Those tribes are the Tekke, Yomut, Ersari, Chodor, and Saryk.

(Note: Dudin is quoted in 'Thirty Turkmen Rugs - Masterpieces from the Collection of S. M. Dudin, Part II (Saryk Weavings)' by Elena Tsareva, originally published in Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 11, #1)


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Strong Sales But Low Investments Spell Trouble For Afghan Carpet Producers

KABUL, October 2, 2010 – Sales are good in Kabul, where both large numbers of foreigners and newly prosperous Afghans create a steady business for carpet dealers.

In Najeb Zarab market, where wholesale and retail carpet shops fill the inner courtyard of a large building, the famous red-and-black weavings so characteristic of northern Afghanistan reign supreme.

NATO and U.S. soldiers come looking for souvenirs and buy a six-square-meter Khal Mohammadi design for $ 2,000 or two of them for $ 3,000.

And Afghan shoppers come for rugs to fill their reception rooms or give as gifts. During the recent Eid holidays, the shop owners say, business was particularly brisk.

But if the fast turnover suggests good times for Afghan rug merchants, that is only half the story.

Many will tell you that the sales only hide a very worrisome business trend. And that is the flight of capital investment from their industry. Without new investment, they fear, the country's still just revived carpet sector will shrink despite the strong market demand.

Subhan Gul is CEO of Hali Weavers, a young company that has exhibited its products at international trade shows such as Domotex in Hannover and won awards for its design innovations.

A visitor might expect him to be upbeat about his success, and he is. But he also surprises guests with the extent of his concern about the future.

In previous decades, Subhan says, when he and many other Afghan weavers were based in refugee camps in Pakistan, there was virtually no domestic Afghan market for rugs. But unlike today there was plenty of investment money.

In those days, wealthy Afghans who fled the country to escape its wars needed somewhere to put their money to work. And in Pakistan they often put it into the refugee carpet industry since they lacked the contacts needed to invest it in other sectors of the Pakistani economy.

The returns for the investors were good because, at that time, the global economy was strong. Afghan weavers in Pakistan enjoyed notable successes, including launching the now famous chobi design which swept the export market with bold Indo-Persian designs and natural dyes.

The chobi, which appeared some 10 years ago, still remains one of the best selling carpet designs in the world today.

But as Afghan refugees have returned in large numbers to Afghanistan over the past decade, the investment possibilities for those with money have broadened considerably.

Subhan says that these days faster returns can be made by investing in virtually any kind of business that imports consumer goods. The number of shops – from kiosks to a shopping mall complete with escalators – that now fill Kabul's streets offers a measure of how much investment has gone that way.

The impact of the capital flight out of the carpet industry is compounded by a number of other factors, particularly the difficulty of getting bank loans as an alternative. The interest rate for commercial bank loans in Afghanistan today runs 13 to 14 percent. That is compared to just 2.5 to 3 percent in Pakistan, but loan shopping across the border requires the borrower to first be a Pakistani citizen.

Some of the other factors complicating the Afghan producer's finances are the high tax of 15 percent which the Kabul government levies on sales (and which is collected annually when companies renew their licenses); the lack of any government rebates on exports; and a crushing level of bureaucracy which means producers spend some 15 days processing their export documentation for each consignment.

Here is a detail of the weaving on the border of one of Afghanistan's popular red-and-black rugs, a Konduz-Waziri woven in Konduz province.

Afghan carpet producers say they will need new investment if they are ever to complete the process of rebuilding their industry at home. Afghanistan has yet to establish high-quality cutting and finishing facilities comparable to those in Pakistan and much of that downstream work continues to be done at high cost across the border.

New investment is also needed to build up Afghanistan's dye industry and develop its wool sector further. Most of the wool used in Afghan weaving today comes from New Zealand, despite the country having its own famous Ghazni wool which is highly prized by foreign customers.

And, perhaps most of all, investment is needed for that all important activity of any industry: advertising. Without it, and publicity about the uniqueness of the weavers' work, Afghanistan will almost certainly lose ground to powerhouses like China and India which are ready and able to duplicate the Afghans' most successful designs.

For now, the Afghan weavers, many of whom are ethnic Turkmen like Subhan, rely upon the timeless appeal of their traditional red-and-black rugs -- the famous "red rugs" of Central Asia. One of them, a Konduz-Waziri is shown here.

They also are counting upon their ability to keep innovating with the best-selling chobi pattern. Some of the current innovations include add-ons such as silk and gold thread or embossed motifs, and trying different washing techniques such as 'golden wash' to add depth of color and tone.

But if tradition and innovation seem to be enough to keep sales booming for now, they are not enough to make anyone complacent about the future. Instead, without the missing third ingredient – new capital – they may be only enough to stand still in an industry where standing still means losing ground.

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Washington’s Textile Museum Explores A Planet of Weavers

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 28, 2008 – Washington is a city of embassies, big and little, and at first glance the Textile Museum can easily be taken for one.

The museum is in a small neo-classical mansion from the turn of the last century and stands on a shady downtown street near the legations of Ireland and Myanmar. Just as they do, the building has a flagpole out front and the air of discreet charm that diplomats so prize.

But once inside, it is clear that if the Textile Museum is an embassy it represents the entire planet. On display any given month may be classical Persian carpet fragments, or textiles from the highlands of Bolivia, or even a collection of fabrics with nothing in common except that they were all dyed indigo blue in different parts of the world. And that is not to mention periodic exhibits ranging from Central Asian tentbands to fabrics in all shades of red.

Just how devoted to textiles is this place? Even the tiled, Georgian-era washroom on the ground floor offers a surprise. Stenciled in graceful letters around the circumference of the room are the words MORDANT, LOOM, BATIK, PILE, IKAT, and more.

The museum does have a serious side: it is an international center for scholars and collectors with an inventory of some 15,000 textiles and rugs from both the eastern and western hemispheres. It was the first textile-conservation laboratory in the United States and, since 1962 has published the now temporarily suspended research revue ‘The Textile Museum Journal.’

But the museum also very much reflects the personality of its founder and the personal joy he took in discovering, and celebrating, mankind’s fascination with weaving.

The founder is George Hewitt Myers, who was born in 1875. He came of age when the West’s fascination with oriental carpets was at its peak, with demand so great that production soared in Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus. Like many young gentlemen at the time, he bought his first rugs when he went to university -- in his case, an 18th or 19th century Ghiordes prayer rug to help furnish his rooms at Yale. Later, he found the rug was a fraud. But instead of extinguishing his interest in carpets, the forgery only stimulated it.

Myers learned his first lesson in carpets this way: “The first sight of a (genuine) tattered old Ghiordes threw the spotlight of authenticity upon two of three of my earliest purchases,” he said. He discovered his own much more recently made prayer rug had acquired its antique look through “an effective application of pumice stone and elbow grease."


Myers was heir to a sizable share of the Bristol-Myers Pharmaceutical firm, a graduate in forestry management, and a talented businessman. But he decided to make a lifetime achievement out of collecting fabrics. After he moved to Washington, he filled his home with them and involved his guests and scholars in debates over the textiles' origins. His interests soon sent him spinning back through time in search of earlier and earlier pieces.

“When I first bought a few rugs in the 1890s, I had no thought of buying several hundred," he said. "When I first bought textiles in 1910, I had even less thought of buying several thousand. But one thing led to another and the underlying thought, if any, was to find out what went before a certain piece to make it as it was. This of course led back to earlier and earlier forms, somewhat logically.”

By 1925, the year Myers turned 50, conversations with guests were no longer enough. He opened part of his mansion as the Textile Museum. And despite his own active business life, he promoted the museum's steady growth. He spent generously, including paying $18,000 in 1928 to purchase a Lotto carpet fragment even though he already had a palace-sized Lotto in his collection. He recognized that the fragment preserved a better quality of drawing than did the full carpet.

When Myers died at age 82 in 1957, he left his Textile Museum with one fourth of his fortune and his belief that to study textiles is to learn about the world. Today, the institution is considered to be the foremost museum in the western hemisphere devoted to the preservation, study and exhibition of handmade textiles. Its popularity has grown enough that the museum plans to expand next year into an additional display space near the Washington Mall, where most of the capital’s museums are located.

But if the museum is enlarging, its spirit remains the same. That can be seen most Saturdays, when crowds gather for a weekly “Rug and Textile Appreciation Morning.”

The number of enthusiasts varies from 30 to 40 and discussion topics are as wide-ranging as South Persian bagfaces, Turkmen main carpets and camel trappings, and American quilts. In homage to Myers, the groups meet in the same walnut-paneled drawing room where he and his wife Louise once entertained their friends with discussions of the same subjects.

(Sources for this article include "One Man's Romance with Fiber Created the Textile Museum" by Martha McWilliam in 'Smithsonian Magazine,' and "Legacy of George Hewitt Myers" by Carol Bier in 'Arts of Asia.' Photos courtesy of Textile Museum.)

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Oriental Carpet Books Sell In Strange Ways

LONDON, March 21, 2008 -- Books about rugs may seem like a no-surprise part of the Oriental Carpet trade. But when it comes to how the books are sold, the business is very much a world of its own.

There may be thousands of carpet retailers spread across the globe. Yet there is only a handful of dealers who specialize in rug books and stock enough of a variety to interest collectors.

One of those retailers is Ed Stott, who operates Oxianna Books from his home base near London. Indeed, his base is his home because, as for most of the specialist booksellers, the business does not generate enough profit to warrant shop space.

Stott says ‘the bread and butter’ of the trade are specialty books for connoisseurs.

“People who have just spent serious money for a carpet, rug, or bagface will want to buy the book if the piece is published, if only to show friends,” he says.

After all, a book full of rare rugs including something similar to one’s own goes a long way toward authenticating a piece to any doubters in the crowd. And perhaps it can even help ease relatives’ shock over a rug’s sticker price.

One of the most highly sought-after books among collectors is the catalogue for an exhibition of Turkmen weavings held at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C in 1980. The catalogue, ‘Turkmen’ by J. Thompson and L. Mackey, has sold an estimated 5,000 copies, something Stott believes is a record for a specialist book.

Some other books -- like rare rugs themselves -- appreciate in value over time. One is ‘Rugs of the Peasants and Nomads of Anatolia’ by W. Bruggemann and H. Bohmer. It was originally published in 1983 with just 500 copies in German and 500 copies in English at the price of 60 British pounds a copy. Today, Stott says, a first-edition copy is fetching 400 pounds.

But if collectors are ready to pay high prices for specialist books, they appear to have mixed emotions about another source of information on rugs: auction catelogues.

Stott says a few auction catelogues are highly sought after because they are the stock of a single collector or dealer and may offer more information than appears in general-audience carpet books.

But most catelogues are considered to have only modest value because the pictures are post-card sized and, Stott says, the digital process can enhance the colors. After all, the intention of the catalogues is to sell carpets in auctions and advertising is advertising.

The world of carpet books is still a new one, with the earliest dating back only to around the 1900s. Stott says there were a few early German authors at that time but that it was really not until after World War II that books started to appear regularly.

At first, authors tended to be academic in their writing. But by the 1970s they also began aiming at more general readers. One of the pioneers was ‘Woven Gardens, Nomad and Village Rugs of the Fars Province of Southern Persia,’ by D. Black and J. Loveless. It caught, and expanded, the wave of interest in nomadic and village carpets at the time.

How does someone get into the business of dealing in specialist rug books?

In Stott's case, it was quite by accident. Ten years ago, his job as computer expert at British Gas was made redundant. But opportunity presented itself in the form of a friend who was going through a divorce and needed to dispose of a whole collection of books about carpets, travel, and related subjects.

Stott combined the collection with the rise of e-commerce and his mail-order Oxianna Books was born.

But it is not an easy business to be in, particularly today.

As a dealer based in Europe, Oxianna is hard-hit by the exchange rate when it does business with American customers. The weak dollar has made merchandise priced in British pounds or euros more expensive than before.

And compared to a few years ago -- when many new carpets books were published – today’s trend is toward fewer and ever pricier tomes. That is because color reproduction of photographs is very costly -- so much so that publishing a top-quality book now often requires having a carpet club or other sponsor subsidize the project.

Perhaps that is why many specialist bookstore owners engage in their business only part-time and without giving up other professions they may have. The business has to be as much for the love of carpets as for the hope of rewards.

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