“At the height of my business, trade and financial capabilities, I lovingly devoted three years to the authorship and publication of Baharestan and gave up several million dollars worth of income.”
The above quote by Mr. Malool must be read and understood fully.
Baharestan: A Doorway to Persian Rugs, is the finest book thus far published in Iran on Persian rugs and yet it fails to compete with the magnificence and glory of the Persian rug and the genius of its designers, pattern-makers and the insufferable efforts of the weavers. According to Mr. Malool, this is how the book Baharestan: A Doorway to Persian Rugs, came to be.
“Many researchers and writers in Iran have written about the Persian rug and one must be grateful to them.  However, there was always a need for a fine book which in addition to various discussions on the Persian rug, would also contain large, high quality color images of fine rugs.”
      The publication of Baharestan widely attracted the attention of artists, art aficionados, collectors and national media. I would receive their gratitude and compliments on a daily basis however I was unfortunately uninterested in displaying or collecting these notes and have only chosen to include a few on this site.
      The publication of Baharestan drew everyone’s attention to the designs and colors of rugs more than it ever had and the design and fineness of the patterns and the skill in the color rendering became of more interest.
This is the message of Baharestan that not every curve and line means a design and not every hue is the color of those in love with colors.
      Before the publication of Baharestan, I had for many years and many times visited rug showrooms, shops and stores of Arak, Tehran, Kashan, Tabriz, Qom, Esfahan, Kerman, etc… and sometimes for many a moment stood in front of a single rug.  The Carpet Museum of Iran, Golestan Palace, Sa’ad Abad Palace, Niavaran Palace were regular places of interest and I had for many hours not only appreciated the works of art contained therein but also lovingly adored the carpets housed there. I had visited rug stores in Hamburg, Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles, London, Kuwait, Dubai, and the famous museums of the world such as the British Museum, Victoria & Albert, the Hermitage, the Louvre, the Textile Museum of the United States, Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris, The Vatican Museum, The Topkapı Palace and Carpet Museum of Istanbul, and museums in Cairo, Tashkent, Calcutta, Mumbai, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, etc….  I was either present at the auctions of Christie’s and Sotheby’s or I would follow all the lots in their catalogs.  In addition to all this, I had read about one-hundred books on rugs and about sixty of these have been included in the bibliography section of Baharestan.
I believed that the more I read and saw, the more my standards and criteria would improve and the more visible my insufficiencies in the field would become.
     Fortunately, of all the enthusiasm and interest that Iranian experts and elites in this field showed Baharestan, only a few frowned and showed jealousy.
Most of the respectable and trustworthy members of Iran’s rug industry and bazar and most of those involved in the rug business, were happy about the publication of this book ,But a few of Those who had a financial interest in the rug industry and trade, and considered themselves trustees of the Persian rug, were surprised at the publication of Baharestan.  They did not know that I had quietly for fifty years seen thousands of fine rugs, had been raised in the culture of rugs, had worked in rugs shops and for months been an apprentice in the rug pattern workshops, sweeping and dusting, washed pens, drawn gridlines for the patterns and stolen glances at the hands of the master designers and color renderers.
It was not for me to be in the business of rugs and I did not consider rugs a commodity to earn a living with, but the result of centuries of taste and the loving and interest of Iranians which had reached us at the price of blistered fingers and ruptured discs of Iranian women.
      At Any rate, I considered publishing Baharestan my duty, however, after the initial steps were taken, I realized there were many issues.  Firstly, I had major disagreements with the printing houses.  Some recommended that a book measuring 40x30 cm and weighing 5 kilograms should not be printed in an edition of more than 500 copies.  They were right to think so for they were taking into consideration the market.  Ultimately, Baharestan was printed in 3200 copies.  Another issue was finding  high quality paper which was not available in Iran. 
With no other choice, I purchased and imported 20 tons of paper from one of the most reputable paper mills in Europe.  Another problem was preparing high quality slides of the carpets.  This is a specialized field requiring a flat surface and the positioning of the camera exactly above the center of the rug. Still, despite all this attention to detail, the sides of the rugs become distorted and further, the pile direction of the carpet which can be either light or dark, must be taken into consideration.  All efforts were also made to capture the luster of the carpets.
      Photographing the carpets of National Carpet Museum of Iran had its own challenges: permits were required and they could not be laid out flat.
In the end , I sent my own collection along with a security team to Lorca’s Photography Studio in Tehran whose studio was professionally equipped with a crane and high enough ceilings to photographs the rugs and all their details using 10x12 cm slide film.
      The design of the book, its dimensions, the page layouts, the graphic design, selecting a professional printing house were all decisions that had to be made and I was present at every stage of the process.
       When it was time to print, for one month, I was at the printing house every day.  For every page that was not up to my standards, I would reorder the film and zinc and reprint the page.
      The binding, the design and production of the cover case were the final stages and were all completed with success and the book Baharestan was ready to be distributed after three years of continuous effort.
       Today, it is 2016 and Baharestan is almost a rare book, I no longer have the energy to reprint an edition.  I have therefore prepared the site www.baharestanbook.com so that Baharestan can be readily available for all to read and even print if they need to.