NOTE: This collection includes two previously unpublished volumes, Vol. XVII and Vol. XVIII., a total of 18 volumes.



The final volume of A Survey of Persian Art appeared just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Acclaimed by scholars and reviewers alike, the Survey was an immediate success, and after some years the entire edition went out of print. A prize item in the rare book market for more than a decade (complete sets have repeatedly brought many times the original publication price), a reissue in 1964 failed to foresee the great demand in the home market, Iran, and was soon sold out. A Survey of Persian Art is once again available in a superb reissue. Handsomely buckram-bound in more compact form, the work remains the awesome piece of scholarship that experts the world over hailed on its publication as a "monumental" and "indispensable" picture of a whole civilization. Here, presented in a graceful, lucid text (3,816 pages), copious line drawings (2,129), and excellent photographic reproductions (3,737), is Persia's testimony to culture: architecture, pottery, painting, textiles, sculpture, metalwork, calligraphy, carpets, jewelry, seals, coinage and iconography. Especially lovely are the many line drawings and color reproductions of textile designs. Chosen for their maximum demonstrative value from more than 200 collections in more than 30 countries, these reproductions illustrate Persian art in all its facets and reveal Persian civilization to have been highly gifted and inventive from almost the beginning of human creativeness. Improving upon the original printing in several significant ways, this reissue of A Survey of Persian Art is faithful to the original in all other aspects. Under the supervision of Jay Gluck (a scholar in the field and a printing craftsman), the Japanese printers have combined traditional standards of craftsmanship with today's printing techniques to achieve sharper definition in more than 3,000 black and white plates and superb reproduction of the original art in over 200 color plates. Here the superior color fidelity of the tedious copperplate process to the subtle hues is especially evident in the ceramics and miniatures. The unwieldy size of the original volumes has been corrected by increasing the number of volumes and reducing the size of the pages. Also, a volume of addenda (Vol. XIV) summarizes discoveries and studies made between 1938 and 1960. The Bibliography, planned for publication with the original, but thought lost during the war, has been reconstructed from galley proofs and notes, modernized and published as Volumes XV and XVI, with a comprehensive index to the text. An unrivaled exposition of the subject as a whole, A Survey of Persian Art is a systematic and critical summary that makes a wealth of authoritative material readily accessible to the scholar, collector, and general public. Some of the distinguished contributors to A Survey of Persian Art are: Sir Aurel Stein, Sir Thomas Arnold, Fredrick Sarre, E. T. Newell, Richard Ettinghausen, Eric Schroeder, Lawrence Binyon, Rene Grousset, Josef Orbeli, Ernst Herzfeld, Ernst Kuhnel, Sir E. Denison Ross, David Talbot Rice, Sir George Hill, Kurt Erdmann, Stanley Casson, Henri Masse, Oscar Reuther, Gaston Wiet, and G. Contenau. The volume of addenda adds a new generation of scholars, including distinguished Persians and Japanese.