Oriental Carpets - A Buyer's Guide - Essie Sakhai

 Oriental Carpets - A Buyer's Guide - Essie Sakhai - 144pp, indexed, full-colour plates - Paperback in very good condition.

Sakhai, a London rug dealer from a family of carpet weavers, shares his expertise on history, identification, and value of oriental carpets in this reasonably priced book. He offers tips on judging materials, dyes, patterns, age, and condition when selecting a carpet to buy. In handy guidebook format he describes different types of carpets, accompanied by color and black-and-white photographs (color photographs not seen). The author discusses value in comparative terms only, so prospective buyers will need to study the market to determine fair prices. Caucasian Carpets & Covers is a scholarly work by the curators who assembled the 1994 exhibit "From Kuba to Kars" at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. Their book includes knotted pile rugs from the Caucasus in addition to the materials in that exhibit. The text is detailed and comprehensive, accompanied by maps and photographs, mostly in color. Much of the historical material is from Russian sources available only in the former Soviet Union. Unfortunately, full-page color-detail photographs have no captions, making it necessary for the user to search through the volume for the source photograph to identify the detail. Otherwise, the presentation is excellent; this is a major work in the field.