Oriental Carpets: A Complete Guide - The Classic Reference

by Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III

Book Overview

This comprehensive, authoritative volume by the most regarded names in the field reviews the history of the art of weaving & explains basic carpet-making materials, tools & techniques. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0821225480
• ISBN13: 9780821225486
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Bulfinch Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 5.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 9.6" x 12.4"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 and higher

Customer Reviews

Incredible reference!!

This book is definitely worth every penny! It goes into great detail on the different types of rugs, the history of the people (from a rug making perspective). There are beautiful pictures of rugs as examples, maps showing both the old names of areas as well as those in use today. The writing style is fun to read (not overly dry). The first 80 mpgs or so are dedicated to the rug and rumaking tself - construction, dyes, design, the people who make them. The rest of the book is broken down into the different areas where rugs were/are made. These sections provide great details on the specifics of the styles of rugs produced by those people, why they use certain colors etc. Excelent excellent book! I'd buy it again in a heart beat. Its a big book so its not so easy to take on a trip but a great book to have at home to read through and learn from.

Good!

A bit pricy but worth it. I bought it to read on my way to the UAE/Bahrain. I was planning on buying a carpet and this went a long way towards helped me to know what I was looking at and what to look for. A great book for the novice and experienced, alike. Everybody wanted to borrow it!

The best general book on Oriental rugs for a long time

With the mass of Oriental rug books that have been published in the last ten years (let alone since the 1960s, when writing about Oriental rugs became the raison d'être for collecting them or dealing in them), it seemed almost impossible to hope for a *Good* general book on the subject ever being attempted again - there was simply so much information that had become critical to even a broadly accurate understanding of the subject that one couldn't imagine the surface even being scratched by anything less than a proper ten-volume "Survey". But Murray L. Eiland - one of the authentic Big Daddies of the early Oriental Rug Book Revival - hit on the brilliant idea of taking as a starting point his distinguished standard work 'Oriental Rugs - A Comprehensive Guide', published in the high scholastic manner and drab production values of the early 1970s, and then re-engineering it in co-authorship with his aptly-named son Murray L. Eiland (who says No Man is an Eiland?), to produce, against the odds, what must surely be The General Oriental Carpet Book of our time.Iconoclastically renamed 'Oriental Rugs - A Complete Guide', 'Oriental Rugs', as the new baby will undoubtedly become known in the footsteps of its parent volume, not to mention of the Eilands, incorporates the bulk of the most interesting and important new discoveries, attitudes, nomenclatures, theories and attributions of the past 25 years and packages it all up in the definitive Major Oriental Rug Book De Luxe Coffee Table Edition format, the identifying attribute of which has increasingly become those huge and stunning full page bleeds depicting in the most intimate close-up detail some isolated felicities of colour and ornament extracted from appropriately major examples, which serve here to introduce each of the book's main sections.Within each such section, the work is lavishly endowed with a wealth of richly glowing colour plates illustrating many of the best and most legendary rugs that have been on the world markets over the past two decades, these punctuated by a scattering of excellent maps, diagrams and well-chosen atmospheric pictures of weavers, deserts, mountains, animals, old paintings and the like. The thorough and well laid-out text is similarly interspersed with those entertaining anecdotes and telling on-the-spot findings gained from field-research trips by both father and son to the rug producing countries of the kind made famous by Mr A. Cecil Edwards, although in the hands of the Eilands this documentary evidence is timed and honed for optimum impact with a post-CNN suavity noticeably (some might say, regrettably) absent from A.C. Edward's chapter-ending 'Conversation Piece' cliff-hangers. The result of all this lavish and entertaining mixture is a truely fin de siècle book on Oriental carpets, encompassing outstanding print and paper quality, superb colour illustrations of many of the 'keynote' rugs of the past twenty years that an

The one rug book to own if you're only going to own one.

Murray Eiland set the standard for general, all-purpose oriental rug books back in 1973 when he wrote "ORIENTAL RUGS: A Comprehensive Guide." In one volume he swept away generations of romantic-rug-dealer-folklore and consolidated/expounded the best of what was at that time the current research. In the intervening years this book has seen two revisions, each of which were basically up-dates of new information.This edition, just out, is the fourth. It has a new name, though: "ORIENTAL RUGS: A Complete Guide." A subtle change to be sure, but an important one - one befitting a significantly revised text and any number of new pictures. And no false modesty here: for most purposes this is indeed a "complete guide." Anyone who is just starting out to learn about oriental rugs should own this book. For that matter, anyone who is less than a world-class expert on oriental rugs would benefit from a close reading of Dr. Eiland and his son's easy-to-read, easy-to-understand prose. (Even the experts are going to want to find out what he's thinking.) It is the sort of book that will spend more time in use than on the shelf. Twenty-five years have passed, and once again he (and his son) have set the standard for general oriental rug books. It belongs on every rug aficionado's bookshelf along with Peter Stone's "ORIENTAL RUG LEXICON" and Marla Mallett's "WOVEN STRUCTURES: A Guide to Oriental Rug and Textile Analysis" - to pick two more "must-haves" published in the last year.

For beginning collector's or experts, this can't be beat!

With wonderful full color reproductions of the subject, this book is a piece of art in itself. After a wonderful introduction, the chapters are regionally oriented, making it easy to access specific information, or get an in-depth history. I can imagine myself returning to this book again and again, for many years to come.