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68 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 publication reviews Sumru Belger Krody, editor 2010 Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats, published by Hali Publications Ltd., for The Textile Museum, 304 pp., hardcover, $110.00. Available at www.seattleartmuseum.org. Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats is the catalog for the exhibition of the same name that was organized in 2010 by The Textile Museum of Washington, D.C., and which is now having a limited national tour. Like the exhibition itself, this catalog is rich with color and imagery. For starters, there are 108 color plates and more than 270 additional color and black and white photographs. Even if you did not read the scholarly essays, which you should since they are well written and informative, the lavish color photographs of the nineteenth- century Central Asian ikats are a treat. Sumru Belger Krody is The Textile Museum's Curator of Eastern Hemisphere Collections and she is one of the essayists as well as the editor of the catalog and curator of the exhibition. Her essay, Oasis Style, is a detailed discussion of exactly how the ikat cloth was cut and sewn to make the distinctive ikat robes worn by men, women and children in Central Asia until well into the early twentieth century. She notes in the nomadic cultures of Central Asia it made sense to "wear one's wealth" by wearing prestigious, hard-to-make ikat clothing. Garments were kept for generations, and recycled into clothing for children or other textiles once they became too worn. If only we were so attuned toward recycling today. Other essayists cover technical subjects, such as methods of using local, organic dyes to make the ikats' dazzling colors. And it is interesting to learn that the exquisite silk ikats of Bukhara were generally pounded with mallets after being taken off the loom in order to give the fabric a more silken, shimmery look. Kate Fitz Gibbon's fascinating essay called The Many Lives of Ikat traces the history of ikat in Central Asia from the days of Silk Road trade starting with the Romans. Once silk worms were smuggled out of China around the third century, raising silk worms became a popular and profitable enterprise for women in Central Asia. In the centuries that followed, ikat production grew into a complex system that meant the organization of guilds for silk growers, weavers and dyers. And though the ikats reached their artistic zenith in the late nineteenth century, their beauty and appeal crossed cultures well into the twentieth century. Until the Bolshevik revolution, ikat robes were fashionable as dressing gowns for Russia's urban intellectuals. Today ikat is being used for fashionable clothing, home decor and accessories. And in his excellent essay on the origins of Central Asian ikat design, Andrew Hale neatly sums up the relationship between Islam and ikat design. "...Ikat textiles achieve the most fundamental goal of Islamic art; giving order and meaning to an infinitely complicated universe.... The true meaning of Ikat is in the sublime order distilled, with difficulty, from its abstracted forms of life..." Robin Updike Giacomo de Carlo 2012 Perle di Vetro Veneziane. Una Lunga e Affascinante Storia. Venetian Glass Beads. A Long and Fascinating Story. Publisher not listed: 244 pp., softbound $77.00, postage additional. Within the stark black cover of this large horizontal format bilingual book is Giacomo de Carlo's forty-five year pursuit of the Venetian glass bead. He collected these in his beloved Venice and Murano, in the garden of his property on Sant'Erasmo island, in the areas exposed during low tides of the surrounding lagoons and around the world during his many travels. The Tucson gem shows were an extremely rich resource for de Carlo but he was as persistent with his bead hunting in his home town. In the mid-1990s I was fortunate to be invited to his elegant Venetian home, full of glass beads, mosaics and his own glass art, which now include chevron beads incorporating murrines; some of these same glass ornaments appear in this current book (Ornament Vol. 19, No. 3). Like all passions, there is both beauty and irrationality. While there are full pages of bead photographs, rarely is there mention on their sizes nor total numbers (4,265, we now learned), or how many workshops made these glass treasures. Maria Teresa Sega provides a history of Venice, the Conterie and the classification and dating of Venetian beads but the heart of this volume is the thirty-nine plates of primarily single beads, a few of which are not of Venetian origin. Besides the clear images, de Carlo