Please remember to wipe your feet: A Persian rug from the early 17th century has sold for $33.7 million in New York City. Sotheby's auction house says yesterday's price for the Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet was more than three times the previous auction record for a carpet. It went to an anonymous telephone bidder, and the seller was the Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC. The carpet was part of a collection bequeathed to Corcoran in 1926 by William A. Clark, an industrialist and US senator from Montana. The previous record price for a carpet was $9.6 million for a Persian carpet sold by Christie's in 2010. (More Sotheby's stories.)