Paperback. Cream binding with black title and carpet.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. This is Jack’s own personal copy.

Review: I have dozens of books on oriental and Persian carpets and many other carpets and rugs of the world including Navaho, etc. Many of my books are huge tomes discussing every known famous carpet, all types of carpets and how they’re made. I have even stitched a Persian carpet and plan to do more with many cross stitch and needlepoint books with their designs. I thought I knew a lot about the oldest known carpet, the famous Pazyryk carpet carbon-dated to around the 4th century B.C. But to put it in context, I never thought before how long that was made prior to Jesus Christ and to the Prophet Muhammad. The Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great (559-530 B.C.) and I learned more about how carpets represent the culture and religion of Islam on the first page of the introduction than I knew before. Of course, this book is celebrating the World of Islam Festival of 1976 in the two English museums of Sheffield and Birmingham.

Author May H. Beattie is a world-renowned expert on carpets and she deftly explains them in make-up: weave, “colour,” dating and design. After 32 pages of introduction and discussion of the technical aspects of carpets, there follow 12 color plates of gorgeous carpets. Then follow 60 pages of museum catalogue of those first carpets plus 61 more that are only shown in b&w. Such are the vagaries of publishing in the 1970s. However, the text is pithy, brilliant and enlightening. The bibliography is ridiculously comprehensive and I’m pleased to see that I have some of those books. Each of the 12 world museums that house these carpets is described so you can track down any individual carpet for further study if desired. All in all I really enjoy this book. I give it 4 stars only because it’s not as huge and gloriously in color as many of my other ones are. But a great book nevertheless.