Susan Meller has been collecting and studying textiles for more than forty years. In the 1960s, she worked in the New York textile industry as a designer and strike-off artist for Riegel Textile Corporation, Dan River Mills, and other fabric converters, traveling to their mills in South Carolina and Georgia to supervise the printing of each season’s line of fabrics. This early experience gave her invaluable insight into working operations that were still, in many respects, the same as those of 19th-century cotton factories. She later founded and created the Design Library, formerly in New York City and now located in Wappingers Falls, New York. With over 5 million designs, the Design Library is the largest and most extensive commercial archive of period textiles and original textile designs in the world. Susan Meller is co-author of Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns for Printed Textiles (Abrams, 1991); author of Russian Textiles: Printed Cloth for the Bazaars of Central Asia (Abrams, 2007) and Silk and Cotton: Textiles from the Central Asia that was (Abrams, 2013; La Martinière, 2013); and contributing author to Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats (The Textile Museum, 2010).
