A Persian Caravan – A. Cecil Edwards (1928) (1st ed)

S$85.00

A Persian Caravan – A. Cecil Edwards (1928) (1st ed)

S$85.00

A collection of entertaining Persian tales, related to the author by his Persian friends.

Title: A Persian Caravan

Author: A. Cecil Edwards

Publisher: Duckworth, London, 1928. First edition.

Condition: Hardcover, with dust jacket. Jacket condition good, with a small tear to bottom corner. Book in very good condition, inscription to ffep. With 8 illustrations, from miniatures. 166pp., app 7″ by 5″.

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From dust jacket:

In these ingenious tales the author, who has a long and intimate acquaintance with Persia, reveals most amusingly the humour, the irony and the finesse of his Persian friends. The stories prove once again that the Persians are probably the most intelligent and certainly the most entertaining of the peoples of the Middle East.

The pictures in this book are taken from a collection of Persian miniatures, old and new, in the possession of the author.

Contents:

The Clock

The Governor

Omar’s Grave

The Debt

Burial

Water

The Russian

The Tomb

The Ravine

Davidson

Sanctuary

Pot-Luck

The Convert

The King’s Birthday

About the author (from Wikipedia):

Arthur Cecil Edwards (1881 – 1953 or 1957) was a dealer in and authority on Persian carpets. He was managing director of the Oriental Carpet Manufacturers based in Turkey.

Arthur Edwards was born in Constantinople in 1881 to Charles Reed Edwards (born London) and Louise Baker (born Constantinople). In 1909, Edwards married the American Clara Cary Case in Paris Hill, United States. Their son Arthur was born in 1918 in Hamadan, Iran.

As an OCM employee, Edwards moved to Hamadan, north-western, in 1911, where he built and managed his own carpet production for the company. He and his wife were fascinated by Persian culture. In 1923, they left Iran, traveled to Pakistan for a few months, and finally went to London. There Edwards took over the management of the OCM and expanded its business activities in the United States. He also oversaw the outsourcing of carpet production to India in order to reduce production costs. During the Second World War the family moved to Oxford and then returned to London.

His masterwork was The Persian Carpet (1953), published posthumously and repeatedly reissued. The monograph is still one of the standard works on the Persian carpet. It describes in detail the production, colors, patterns and the stylistic development of the Persian knotted carpet in the different provinces of Iran, as well as the history of the regions, their carpet production, number of looms and production figures since the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, and gives an outlook on the future of the carpet industry under the influence of the European market. It was positively reviewed in The Burlington Magazine who praised it for its up to date and detailed treatment of the weavers then working in Persia.