The Mentor: Chinese Rugs, Vol. 4, Num. 2, Serial No. 102, March 1, 1916

One of the earliest English-language studies to treat Chinese rugs as fine art rather than mere floor coverings. Mumford, writing in 1916, brings obsessive specificity to his subject: knot counts, dimension specifications, dye recipes, and the symbolic vocabulary of dragons, clouds, and lotus blossoms that Chinese weavers encoded into their work. His monograph divides Chinese rug production by workshop and region, distinguishing Peking pieces from Shanxi and examining how Persian design conventions were absorbed and transformed by native aesthetics. This isn't a coffee-table book; it's a collector's manual written by someone who clearly believed these textiles deserved the same scholarly rigor applied to porcelain or jade. For modern readers, the book serves as both a time capsule of early rug scholarship and a fascinating window into what Western collectors valued in Asian art a century ago. The writing has the passionate specificity of a man who has handled hundreds of pieces and wants you to see what he sees.