I have found the Internet an extraordinary source of books on rugs, textiles and everything else. I hope I am in order in recommending http://www.addall.com/ as a search engine. They don't sell books themselves, but they search all the major sites that do.They have separate search pages for new and used books.

Ebay is another good source for used books, if you have the patience. There are almost always good rug books and textile books on offer, and they usually sell at lower than retail prices, sometimes substantially lower. Finding them can be a problem.

My own experience buying books on Ebay has been problem free. Sellers have been every bit as reliable as established dealers, and more reliable than some auction houses. The fifteen or so purchases that I have made isn't a big sample, so it would be interesting to hear about other peoples' experiences

One of the things for which the web is best suited, commerce-wise, is commodities, and thing like books come very close to being commodities. When you buy a book, you know exactly what you're going to get. No messing with color images on the monitor to convince you that the thing is better than it really is, and condition descriptions on used books aren't that tricky. Furthermore, being fairly small ticket items, no vendor can make a killing by screwing you over on one book, so there's rather little of the abuses that the frauds indulge in with rugs.

There are some very useful search utilities for books on the web. I believe some of them were mentioned in a Salon that Jerry Silverman did awhile ago, but adding new ones or repeating those here is certainly OK and will be useful to some.

Regards,

Steve Price

I want to thank Leslie especially for this site.

Although he has said it, it is worth pointing out again explicitly that the particular advantage of this site is that it is conceptually above all the other rug book sites such as advanced book exchange, biblo find, etc.

So when one uses it one gets both comprehensive as well as comparative results in single searches.

Thanks, Leslie. I did not of it before your post.

Steve and I gave a presentation yesterday paralleling this salon at The Textile Museum and we added it to the sites we highlighted there. So your suggestion was very timely for that occasion as well.

Regards,

R. John Howe

Regards, Yon

Without doubting your experience at all, one thing that would produce this result is not selecting the "used books" sector before you search.

As Leslie indicated, this site has a "new books" (I think the default position) and a "used books" sector that you have to select.

I had your experience at first with Robert Pinner's name too but found many hits once I went into the used book sector.

I have not made many searches on it but did punch in a few tests that I thought might be a tad severe, like giving it just "McMullan" only. I got good results.

So I think it's advantage is that it is pitched conceptually a level higher than the other search engines in the sense that it includes them. It even marks that fact in the results.

I'd be glad to be corrected but I think Leslie's suggestion here is a new and useful addition to the book search engines we know.

Regards,

R. John Howe

Regards, Yon

It's the books I don't know I want that are most interesting to me.

-Jerry-

Leslie