Faux Real—a book to fall in love with

摘要

Faux Real is a new work by Robert Kanigel that provides a fascinating insight into the world of leather. A big problem with tanners over the ages is the way they have tended to fall in love with the product, rather than asking the customers what they think of it. Romancing the product is the disease of production people who like to tell their colleagues that sales and marketing expense is not needed because "my leather sells itself". So here at last is a book for these tanners to fall in love with, one which is not a list of formulae or a time-line of events running from ancient Babylon to Jimmy Choo, but a book which takes leather apart diagnostically and gracefully. It interrogates how leather has spent centuries dealing with fakes and synthetic copies and through this window lets us see why leather wins out in the eye, hand and nose of the consumer and, correctly made and sold, looks likely to carry on doing so.