J.C.P Hotz & Son was an import-export consortium with headquarters in London, and offices in Amsterdam, Isfahan, Bushehr, Basra and Shiraz, with subsidiary branches including The Persian Carpet Manufacturing Company Ltd in Sultanabad, Iran, where C.R. Smith was employed. In this letter dated 23 February 1901, Hotz (presumably Albert Hotz, son of J.C.P. Hotz) invites Smith to join a new business venture in Tabriz, and asks him to make discreet investigations into carpet-weaving in that city.

The C.R. Smith archive consists of an album of 60 mounted albumen prints (predominantly portraits and topographical views, taken in Iran and Iraq), a further 24 loose photographs, and a series of letters and memos. These document a correspondence between Charles R. Smith (born 1866) and various colleagues made throughout 1901, when Smith was approached to join a new carpet enterprise in Tabriz. He duly left Sultanabad where he had been working for the Persian Carpet Manufacturing Company, but by July of the same year he had returned to his native Kidderminster in England. It is not known if the Tabriz business plan was ever realised.