The Yerkes Collection of Oriental Carpets with Critical Text by John Kimberly Mumford

Knapp, 1910. Loose Folders in a Box. Fair. Loose plates in a box. Deluxe edition. Numbered. The plate folders are in good condition and are generally clean. One of the plates: number XVII: Silk from Ardabil is missing and has been replaced by a copy in more or less equivalent color on high quality paper. Several of the plates have bumped corners; the Damascus prayer rug folder has a 1 inch tear along the side; the Bagdad rug has a 4 inch tear in the middle of the top. The hardcover case binding which holds the plates is in poor condition: the spine is missing so the front and back covers are loose, the cloth ties holding the case closed are missing, the front silk cloth is detached along one edge, the covers are heavily worn at the edges and there are large water stains on the inside, although not affecting the plate folders. This is the deluxe edition, bound in green silk and is numbered: number 7 of 750 opies. Mumford, J. K. THE YERKES COLLECTION OF ORIENTAL CARPETS WITH CRITICAL TEXT BY JOHN KIMBERLY MUMFORD. 1910, Knapp, 55.5 x 27 cm., 27 color illustrations. Charles T. Yerkes made his money developing the Chicago tram system and the London underground after running various banking and stock brokerage companies. His collecting interests included Barbizon painters, and old Persian carpets, at a time when older Persian carpets were coming on the market and thus available to rich entrepreneurs. He focused on 16th century Persian carpets, believing that this was the high point of Persian carpet production. Yerkes planned to publish this catalogue, of what he considered the finest Persian carpets, but died before able to do so. This portfolio was completed after his death. The portfolio consists of 27 plates of 15th, 16th, and other old carpets and documents one of the major collections of classical Persian carpets. The color illustrations are full page and hand-painted by artists from the New York School of Applied Design; they are good. The 27 rugs are illustrated in separate bifolia, with one page showing the rug and a facing full page comment by Mumford. There is a separate 4 sheet introductory pamphlet which has the bibliographic data, a page on Yerkes and his collection and a list of the plates. The rugs consist of classical Persian rugs: 1 15th century, 8 16th century, the V & A Ardabil (which he did not own), 8 old Persian rugs plus a 16th century Bagdad, a Hispano-Moresque, a 16th century Saracenic, a Damascus prayer rug, and 5 Polonaise carpets.