Oriental Rugs, A. U. Dilley & Co.

Spotted at my regular haunt, the weekly library sale's 25¢ pamplet bin—a clothbound book with gilt cover design of a rug, complete with fringe.

Publication details inside were "1909, The Tudor Press, Boston"—so I was surprised this hadn't been caught and marked as a "collectible."

But even before spotting the date, I was amazed to see an end paper with the original owner's bookplate—

Yes, the name is this fellow's—

The book seems to have been a giveaway to customers of the "Oriental Rug Adviser"—

The text is quite informative, with photos and examples devoted to designs and weaving techniques of many different regions and ethnic groups.

It made sense that Stickley would acquire this for his library, as it seemed an authoritative guide to the subject. Despite the connection to a shop, this is no direct sales pitch; instead, the text is full of points on how to identify rug types and quality—including how to spot deceptive practices. The author writes in detail about methods of "aging" new carpets passed off as antiques, as well as other ways of selling poor quality merchandise to the unwary.

Searching the author's name, I learned that Arthur Urbane Dilley was not only a rug dealer, but also a noted authority on the subject. He later wrote full-fledged tomes; the 1909 book is eighty-one pages, and a complete scan is available here.

I was getting the picture of a gentleman-scholar type, and soon found that Dilley had founded an organization full of them: the Hajji Baba Club. Named for the hero of a nineteenth century novel, the club is a world all its own.

From the club site's history:

...The club was formed in 1932, and early meetings were held in an apartment designed to recreate the setting from where the rugs came: Sheridan Square as Turkman yurt, and the home of Arthur Arwine, engineer. The other founding members were Roy Winton and Arthur Gale, both involved in aspects of the film industry, Anton Lau, another engineer, and Arthur Dilley, the scholar and dealer whose interest was his full-time job. Soon to join the rapidly expanding club were engineer Joseph McMullan, who amassed perhaps the most impressive collection of the group, and Maurice Dimand, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Those 1930s "Hajjis" and their Sheridan Square yurts may be rather quaint. But the club is still around and has done some nice museum exhibits; links to information and virtual tours here.

The club site's biography of "the first Hajji" describes Dilley's education at Harvard—where he lived in a residence room once occupied by Henry David Thoreau, a coincidence that fueled Dilley's ambition to become a great writer. Later drawn to studying antique Oriental rugs, Dilley developed a fascination that led to his career as rug dealer and scholar. Or make that, a scholar who was content to sell a rug as long as he could first educate the buyer to sufficiently appreciate it.

The bio also explains why my copy of the book has the original (Boston) address papered over, and a correction stamped in—

Dilley had set up shop in Boston, where in 1914 a devoted customer persuaded (and financed) him in moving the business to New York.

That patron also launched Dilley as a lecturer at museums, women's clubs, and other cultural venues. Before long—

Having firmly established himself in New York and having written dozens of lectures on a whole range of carpet-related topics, Dilley began to consider a major work on the subject. During the 1920s, rugs were a hot topic and, given the commercial success that Charles Scribner’s Sons had enjoyed with [John Kimberly] Mumford's Oriental Rugs – an immediate triumph in 1900 and by the 1920s in its fourth printing – Dilley had good reason to believe he could sell them the idea of offering another book on the same subject. He signed a contract with the publisher while both the United States economy and interest in rugs were dashing along at top speed, but unfortunately the Great Depression arrived before his book appeared, which meant that it, unlike Mumford's work, tended to sit on bookstore shelves.

But poor sales – only a thousand copies during its first two years in print – failed to dampen Dilley’s enthusiasm for his work. He thought of it as a literary achievement, not as a commercial commodity, and when, a few years later, he discovered a Houghton Mifflin textbook that included an excerpt from his book as a model of well-executed prose alongside examples from the likes of Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and Charles Lamb, Dilley considered his efforts validated, his book a triumph, the finest feather in his cap, one he would never exchange for a place on a list of best-sellers.