Our Arts & Crafts collection features authentic designs, many of which have not been seen for almost 100 years. Famous Donegal Arts & Crafts carpets were originally advertised around 1900 "principally in soft shades of terra-cotta red, blue, greens, and golden browns." Our new Arts & Crafts collection is carefully crafted in India of beautifully coloured and richly textured Astrakhan wool. For unparalleled luxury, we also offer our Arts & Crafts designs rendered in a sumptuous pile of pure mohair. These stunning hand-knotted carpets are surely worthy of the Donegal name.

The arts and crafts movement was a unique episode in British culture. It sparked off a wholesale reaction against the bad design and poor quality of industrial mass production, a reaction that still continues today, a century later. Among the movement's greatest achievements were its carpets, yet their quality has never been generally recognized and for too long they have been trodden underfoot and largely ignored. Arts and Crafts Carpets, the first book ever published on the subject, puts this injustice right.

In an authoritative and entertaining book based on extensive original research, Malcolm Haslam traces the development of carpet design and manufacture within the wider context of the arts and crafts movement. As well as studying the carpets themselves, he focuses on the designers and manufacturers who created them.

Introduced by David Black, the main part of the text is divided into four chapters. The first recreates the ideological background that influenced such designers as Matthew Digby Wyatt, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser. Chapter 2 looks at the work of 'the Master', William Morris, many of whose carpets were produced by his own firm, Morris & Co. Chapter 3 concentrates on Morton's handknotted rugs from Donegal. In the final chapter, the machine-woven carpets in the arts and crafts style,and the work of the small independent weavers and groups inspired by Morris's example  such as the Dun Emer Guild, the Canterbury Weavers and Godfrey BIount  complete the story At the end of the book, a technical section analyses the structure of the carpets and the materials and dyes used.

Superbly illustrated with over 200 pictures, many from historical sources, and inciuding 85 specially commissioned colour photographs of the most splendid examples, many of which are now dispersed all over the world, Arts and Crafts Carpets is enthralling to read and comprehensive in its scope in short, the definitive book on the subject. With the current burgeoning interest in arts and crafts artefacts, Arts and Crafts Carpets will make an essential addition to the bookshelves of rug and carpet collectors, art historians and everybody interested in the arts and crafts movement.

AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD by David Black

1 'THIS IS FACT, THIS IS TASTE,'

The evolution of the arts and crafts attitude to carpet design

2 THE MASTER

The machine-woven and hand-knotted carpets designed by William Morris

3 FROM TURKEY TO DONEGAL

The hand-knotted carpets produced by Alexander Morton & Co.,

designed by C. F. A. Voysey and others

4 DESIGNS FOR FACTORY AND GUILD

Machine-woven carpets in the arts and crafts style produced by leading

manufacturers; hand-knotted carpets made by small groups of independent

weavers

NOTES

APPENDIX

Structural Analysis by Anne Amos

Dye Analysis by G. W. Taylor

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX