A Comprehensive Guide to Oriental and Specialty Rug Cleaning
The first book of its kind with over 900 color photographs, maps and drawings that illustrate how to identify, inspect, and clean rugs mst commonly encountered in rug cleaning plants. Drawing upon their years of cleaning, teaching, and appraising skills as well as knowledge of the most respected and successful oriental rug cleaning plans in the country, the authors combined research with firsthand knowledge in developing the most comprehensive guide in the rug cleaning industry. In an article by Dr. Steven Spivak, textiles technical expert with ASCR International and the ASCR Foundation, praises the value of this publication: Writing worth reading can be a life changing event. For a serious, substantial new book, these opening words apply not only to reader and book buyer, but as well to the authors. It applies exactly to the recent arrival of A Comprehenisve Guide to Oriental & Specialty Rug Cleaning by Amirkhan and Groseclose. This splendid, lavishly illustrated and comprehensive new rug book and cleaning guide will change the way many flooring retailers, professional cleaners, rug aficionados and our greater ASCR community will think and learn about oriental, area and specialty rugs. At 400 pages with over 900 hundred illustrations and photographs, most in full color, plus easy to understand diagrams, maps and explanatory drawings, this is one special book huzzah! It took the authors, highly respected oriental rug and rug cleaning experts, teachers, lecturers and authors, about four years of painstaking effort to bring this new rug cleaning compendium to us. It s worth the effort and demands serious attention. The rug cleaning guide contains eighteen chapters plus a glossary of terms, recommended references and a detailed index. The book is divided into several logical sections beginning with rug materials fibers and dyes; then construction and features of the many variations of machine-made rugs, plus specialty and area rugs. A major portion on hand-knotted rugs with their classification, construction, design features and means of identification. Thereafter follows the chemistry of rug cleaning, pre-inspection for problems and successful cleaning, and detailed rug cleaning methods with numerous cleaning alternatives clearly given. Rug spotting and spot removal, cleaning related problems and practical solutions comprise a major aspect of the book. A list of rug and rug cleaning resources, a mini-buyer s guide if you like, is useful to anyone in the textile furnishings and cleaning business, or thinking of diversifying further into rug cleaning. A meaningful quote begins their introduction and prelude to rug history. It s descriptive of rug marketing and retailing as well as cleaning and rug collecting. To rug neophytes as well as to experts and rug cleaners, the following describes that special love and affection many have for oriental and specialty rugs. The authors analogize rugs to Winston Churchill s portentous view of the late Soviet Union as: 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, [since this] also describes the world of oriental rugs.' Therein shows a rug s mystique and inner beauty, plus the affection from those whose business it is to import, sell, swap, collect, decorate with and/or clean and repair rugs. There are many cleaning manuals, guides, smaller or insubstantial 'books' and the like in our industry. But seldom does such a labor of love, an enormous expense in authors time, effort and cost to produce, appear for us to take notice. The Amirkhan and Groseclose Oriental & specialty Rug Cleaning book is one of those - 'first among equals' in the rug cleaning business.