Building a Recommended Reading Library: More Than a List of Books

Natural dyeing is one of those subjects where the more you learn, the larger it becomes.

Start with a handful of plants and before long you're reading about textile history, botany, chemistry, agriculture, archaeology, traditional crafts, indigo fermentation, mordants, pigments, printing and historical trade routes.

There is an enormous amount of knowledge out there.

There is also an enormous amount of information.

And those aren't necessarily the same thing.

This is one of the reasons we've begun building a Recommended Reading Tab within the Resource Library > within The Natural Dyers & Growers Academy.

Not another list of "the best natural dye books"

I didn't want to create a page containing 50 book covers and affiliate links and call it a resource library.

Instead, we're taking our time.

We're looking at individual authors and practitioners, the contribution they've made to the field, their principal publications and where their work might be particularly useful to a natural dyer.

Our collection currently includes Dominique Cardon, John Marshall, Jenny Dean, Michel Garcia, India Flint and J. N. "Jim" Liles, with a new author or resource being added each week.

They represent remarkably different approaches to natural colour.

Cardon's work takes us deep into the history and science of dyes. John Marshall opens doors into indigo and Japanese textile traditions. Jenny Dean has made practical natural dyeing accessible to generations of dyers. Michel Garcia asks us to understand the processes and chemistry behind what we do. India Flint explores botanical colour, ecoprint and our relationship with place. And Jim Liles documents an extraordinarily broad world of traditional dye recipes and processes.

Put them together and something much more interesting begins to emerge.

Reading critically matters

There is another reason I think a curated library is useful.

A published recipe isn't automatically a recipe we should use.

Natural dye literature spans centuries, and even books written relatively recently may document substances and processes that we now understand very differently.

Jim Liles' The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing, for example, is an immensely valuable technical and historical reference. It also includes recipes involving chromium compounds and other materials that raise serious health and environmental concerns.

That doesn't make the book worthless. Far from it.

It means we need to know how to read it.

What was that ingredient doing? Why was it used? What does the process teach us about colour chemistry? Would we use it today? Is there a safer way of achieving the same function?

For me, this is where a learning community can offer something a bookshelf alone cannot.

Free resources and deeper study

We've made part of the Natural Dye Library available to everyone in our free Academy community.

There you'll find selected reading recommendations and introductions to the people whose work we believe is worth knowing.

FREE LIBRARY LINK

Full Academy members have access to the extended library. Those resources can include fuller bibliographies, direct purchasing links, additional publications, useful films and external resources, and—importantly—our own notes and context around the material.

FULL MEMBERSHIP LIBRARY LINK

We're deliberately building it slowly, adding to it each week rather than attempting to make it "complete."

Because I don't think it ever will be.

A library of natural colour

Eventually, I would like this to reach considerably further than books.

Historical dye manuals and manuscripts belong here. Scientific papers belong here. Important research into particular plants, pigments and processes belongs here. So do some of the people whose knowledge has largely been passed on through teaching rather than publishing.

Natural dyeing doesn't exist in isolation. It is an accumulation of knowledge passed between growers, dyers, craftspeople, scientists, historians and cultures over a very long time.

Our Natural Dye Library is our attempt to make some of that knowledge easier to find, understand and explore.