Why are so many sold as cushions?

A bag face is a flat decorated panel, roughly square once cut from its plain back, so it takes to a cushion cover with no reshaping. Seventeen titles mention a cushion, and thirteen pair the words face and cushion. The cushion format is heavier in current stock than in what has already sold, and the quoted sizes are consistent: 45 x 45cm and 50 x 50cm.

A narrow-necked woven bag made for carrying salt, the shape designed so the contents stayed put. Eight titles name one. They sit alongside saddlebags, bedding bags and tent-pole covers as functional equipment woven by nomadic households rather than for sale.

How old are these bags?

The dated field runs 1850 to 1960. The bulk sits either side of 1900, with the 1900s, 1920s and 1930s the fullest decades and a smaller group in the 1880s and 1890s. Some carry a period label instead of a year: nineteenth century, Edwardian or Victorian. Weavings in particular are rounded to circa 1900 or circa 1880, which is a convention rather than a precise date. The earliest thing dated is a nineteenth-century leather post bag; the latest a coated-canvas suit carrier of 1960.

Which regions do the woven bags come from?

The origins read like a gazetteer of Persia and its neighbours: Fars, Kerman, Khorassan, Kurdistan, Luristan, the Chahar Mahal, Azerbaijan, the Trans-Caspian steppes, the Merv Oasis and south-west Afghanistan. The Central Asian origins are the thinnest on the ground. Turkmen tent-pole bags, a Teke kap from the Merv Oasis and a double-sided silk ikat purse from Uzbekistan each appear only once or twice.

Do designer handbags appear in this category?

Not as a population. Labelled fashion pieces show up only as isolated one-offs in individual titles, so there's no run of them to speak of. The ladies' bags that do recur are evening, clutch and Art Deco examples, about one in ten listings, in beadwork, silk, suede, Bakelite, Lucite and reptile skins.

How often do these come up for sale?

About thirteen a year come to market on Sellingantiques, and forty-nine different dealers have listed one. Most dealers who handle a bag handle a single example and move on. The heading also shelters a few things that aren't bags at all, a set of powder flasks, a sewing work table, a Chinese stone seal, because a bag is named somewhere in the title. A travelling inkwell made as a miniature Gladstone turns up too.

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Antique Bags

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Two quite different things share this heading: hand-woven tribal bags from Persia and Central Asia, made to carry salt, bedding and tent poles, and Western leather travelling bags built for the railway age.