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.

September - Card of the Month

Japanese post card, c. 1960s-1970s; captioned on reverse—

Fireworks in Summer

In summer season, big displays of fireworks are presented at several places around Tokyo. At each home, children have a pleasure of their own small and fancy fire-works (fire-crackers) with their friends.

Hello!

The quaint design has been in use for some time, as the wrapper is from only a few years ago.

I used to see this often in Asian groceries. I haven't thought to look for it lately, so I wonder if the manufacturer still uses the logo—what with everyone in Thailand no doubt on a cell.

I do like the retro design ... even if this is way too much like being at the office—

Ask Any Field Office

Found during some housecleaning for an elderly relative—

U. S. Government Printing Office, 1950

This is a trifold leaflet, so the unfolded outer pages look like this—
The inner pages—

Some details, in fine 1950 cartoon style—


This merits noting: if you lose your card, go to the nearest field office for help.

And if you don't know where an office is—I'll take a guess that local offices were well-distributed not only in 1950, but until fairly recently—as the post-Reagan drive to destroy government services benefitting the average person has triumphed.

This leaflet is a reminder of the days when service was a given, and explained with jaunty cartoons.

Long before anyone would have imagined a Congresswoman Crazy Eyes attracting supporters by denouncing government—and after a lifetime of benefitting from it, herself.

No doubt her retired followers will soon be calling for the government to get its hands off their Social Security.

... Or sharing some similarly reasoned opinions.

August - Card of The Month

Japanese post card, c. 1960s-1970s; captioned on reverse—

Swimming Season

In summer, almost every week-end the city people visit mountain and/or swimming resorts with their children and enjoy their family trips. Especially, swimming resorts located near Tokyo and other big cities

"Card of the Month" for now... but really: these kids and their sand-mud pies are among the all-time prizes.

Good, Inside and Out

I've suggested below that the out of control technology of nuclear power—and a rather out of control quantity of consumer goods—must make the cleanup of northeastern Japan a task very different from the country's post-World War II rebuilding.

For one thing, modern marketing and consumption habits make disposable packaging ubiquitous. And in a country where presentation is so important, each cookie in a box is likely to be wrapped individually. When I lived in Japan in the mid-1980s, I also learned that you have to speak up fast, before the book store clerk wraps the magazine you've just bought to read on the train.

Japan is a country where packaging is an art, and traditional wrapping can be both artful and reuseable. The practice of carrying furoshiki is being encouraged again by Japan's Ministry of the Environment.

And Japanese are very recycling conscious: a point American right-wing pundits— shameless as ever—used in mocking tsunami survivors.

Food tins are one type of packaging that can be reused as storage containers, if not put out with the recycling. For me, the designs on Japanese tins made it hard to part with any I acquired.

It was in the U.S., though, that I found this sembei tin—at a Seattle Buddhist church rummage sale, late in the 1990s.

The color scheme seems to be from the 1970s. If that's right, the tin was likely reused for twenty or more years before it came my way.

The post-war urge to decorate things with English (or the appearance of English) is also on display here.

In this case, English seems not a matter of flashy marketing but of eagerness to inform buyers of the product's great virtues:

MIRINYAKI
OKAKI
"MOCHI CRUNCH"
...

Delicious tea-Cake

Tasty accompaniment to adr-
ink nice relish taked with beer.

Good taste and nourishment are our
first consideration in making this
sliced rice-cake by the recipe of our
own, using superior materials and
genuine soy and a sweet kind of sake.
This rice-cake digests well, nutri-
tious, and will suit your taste. We
solicit you orders.

The text may have been written for the tin. Or it may have done double duty, as it sounds like it could have been part of a letter pitching the product to foreign distributors.

The earnestness does seem quaint because, by the 1980s, English words and phrases connected to products and marketing were pretty much decorative. When there was a vogue for the word "communication," there were "Chocolate Communication" candy bars, "Bread Communication" bakeries, and more.

Some products have designs incorporating longer pieces of text. These sometimes start off sounding fluent; but then... To quote a tee-shirt from around 1985:

It is imperative that the rising generation master at least one foreign language. I like study Engrish.

Sometimes I saw products with sentences or paragraphs in a Romance language, French being most common. To me (and my high school French ability), those examples seemed far more grammatical than the usual English on products—I think because those texts were likely lifted from some printed source.

It was the seemingly literary passages, appearing in strange, out of context uses, that was so striking.

My favorite example is this cake tin...


... and the tale it tells:


My translation:

She never went out. She would rise each morning at the same time, look at the weather from her window, then sit down before the fire in the room.

When she had finished her meal, she went to the window and looked at the Rue de Seine, full of people.

Taken from a literary rendering of upper class ennui?

A sad story; and yet, it seems quite grammatical.

Nagoya, 1945: Survival - Gratitude - Creation

I've posted some images and thoughts on Japan's current disasters, both natural and man-made.

As I've also noted, the staggering task before Japan is complicated by years of economic prosperity. Even aside from the technological disaster of how to contain deadly nuclear reactors, the earthquake and tsunami left a region of the country buried under the everyday toxic materials of consumer society.

The big picture starts to make the country's task of rebuilding after World War II seem easy, in comparison: as if it had been mainly a matter of clearing rubble to make a clean start.

And despite the post-war scarcity of food and necessities, much of a war-weary populace looked forward to a freer life in a more democratic environment.

These thoughts of "then" versus "now"—and of the survivors whose lives were so terribly disrupted this March—also got me thinking about Ayako Miyawaki.

I didn't know her name at the time, but I started to see her designs when I lived in western Japan.

First, was this poster for a 1984 exhibition of appliqué works—
Unfortunately, I only saw the poster, not the show. But I was struck by the lively textile use in this design.

Then I began to notice fabric products printed with appliqué designs by the same artist. These were natural forms like fruit and vegetables, all fashioned from colorful textiles and signed with the syllable あ ["Ah".]

Catalog of a 1991 exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in D.C.

Beautifully printed in Japan, this detailed look at the work is next-best to actually seeing it. (All images below are from the book.)

This is how I finally learned the artist's name, and something of her story: told in the catalog's biographical sketch, critical notes, and Ayako's own words.

Born in 1905, she married Haru Miyawaki, a painter who taught public school in Nagoya, where the couple lived with their three children.

Ayako was forty when the war ended. On that day—August 15, 1945—

...when tears streamed ceaselessly down my cheeks, I realized now that I would be free to use time I had so long spent in vain going in and out of the bomb shelter on many hard and unbearable days during wartime.

I was happy that the war was over and excited about my own free time, which I yearned to have and which had been long in coming. It was then that I thought I should begin to do something for myself. "Appliqué work" was the first thing that came to my mind.

It was a craft already popular in Japan, but generally done from printed patterns. Taking the old clothes and rags that were available to her, Ayako went to work on her own designs, based on observing natural forms.

When I completed my first work, I gave it a close and joyful embrace! I decided to produce one work a day and exhibited them on the wall of my room. Sometimes I asked my husband to comment on my creations, and sometimes my children would review my work as if they were full-fledged art critics. Those were happy days.

Beginning from that sense of gratitude at the opportunity to start over, joined to her creativity in observation and design, Ayako developed her work over the years.

The designs use a variety of fabrics, often Japanese prints, batiks, and kasuri.

The latter is a technique akin to ikat, with designs traditionally woven in white on an indigo background. An illustrated pdf on kasuri/ikat technique and design is here. Some colorful mass-produced kasuri of the 1950s—and even more colorful labels from the fabric bolts—are here.

Ayako makes ingenious use of printed fabrics and kasuri to form details:

Flatfish and Camellia, 1973

Chinese Cabbage, 1975

Swellfish, 1986

Various fibers also contribute detail:

Onion Cut in Two, 1965

Potential materials are all around us, and in the mid-1980s, Ayako did a number of designs from used coffee filter cloth.

Haniwa Clay Figure of a Dog, 1985

Haniwa Clay Figures of a Man and Woman Dancing, 1985

Oh, It's My Grandpa! 1985

As a textile lover, I find Ayako's work very pleasing in design and choice of materials. This noren curtain is especially charming, as she comments directly on both materials and forms.

Good Forms and Fine Textiles, 1986

A closeup of one bit of a panel shows the beauty of the fabric details contained in each gourd shape:
Ayako began exhibiting work to the public in the 1950s.

... In those days I was full of love for pieces of fabric, nature and natural objects, and full of the joy of creation. As time went on, when I felt aged, I realized how much I was mentally supported by creating my works—I became strong by having a solid purpose in life.

Over the years she received greater recognition, and a mid-1980s exhibit traveled to several Japanese cities.

After her husband's death in 1985—

... I was not myself for some time. But when I was told I could set his soul at rest by continuing my work, I started in again, bit by bit. I always think that my husband's soul is still with me. Whenever happy and delightful things happen to me, I feel his soul keeping guard over me.

In 1988 the Asahi Shimbun, a major national newspaper, arranged for a show to tour Japan, then go on display in D.C.

... When I first heard of this [American exhibit], I was near to tears with joy. I think my husband would be the second person to be glad of this news, if he were here. I can hear his voice saying, "good for you." I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude, as well as that of my late husband. Now I feel as happy as when I created my first works. Involuntarily, I am clasping my hands in prayer.