bookbinding, parchment, vellum
hornbooks, bellows, hinges
pump washers, airtight floats
spinning-wheel belts
cricket balls, drumheads, banjos
surgical trusses
Leather differs not only according to the species of creature it comes from but according to the age and sometimes the sex of the animal, and also the part of the animal’s body it once covered. Its characteristics vary depending on the type of processing it undergoes—whether by liming, tanning, tawing (mineral tanning), or shamoying (oil tanning)—and depending on how these processes are varied and combined.
Leather can be stiff as bone or supple as silk, nearly as waterproof as rubber or capable of sopping up water like a sponge, tough and unyielding or resilient and stretchy, smooth and translucent as paper, deeply grained in many patterns, or softly napped. It may be snowwhite or range through hues of tan and red to dark brown. It may be molded, carved, and colored in endless array. As leatherworkers for many centuries have been fond of reminding the world, “There’s nothing like leather.”
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE TANNING
Homer’s Iliad contains what may be the earliest surviving literary reference to leathermaking. Describing the swaying fight for possession of Patroclus’s corpse, the author (in Pope’s translation) wrote: