Faux Real!

Faux Real: Genuine Leather and 200 Years of Inspired Fakes By Robert Kanigel What makes genuine leather genuine? What makes real things . . . real? In an age of virtual reality, veneers, synthetics, plastics, fakes, and knockoffs, it’s hard to know. Over the centuries, men and women have devoted enormous energy to making fake things seem real. As early as the 14th century, fabric was treated with special oils to make it resemble leather. In the 1870s came Leatherette, a new bookbinding material. The 20th century has given us Fabrikoid, Naugahyde, Corfam, and Ultrasuede. Each claims to transcend leather’s limitations, to do better than nature itself or at least to convince consumers that it has. From formica, vinyl siding, and particle board to cubic zirconium, knockoff designer bags, and genetically altered foods, inspired fakes of every description fly the polyester pennant of a brave new man-made world. Each represents an often passionate journey of scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial innovation. Faux Real explores this borderland of the almost-real, the ersatz, and the fake, illuminating a centuries-old culture war between the authentic and the imitative. Faux Real is a book about leather and its imitators; it is about “natural” materials and the man-made ones that would replace them, and have replaced them. It is about the people who bring new materials to the world and those who cherish one old material, leather, that’s been part of the human experience for thousands of years. It is about the surface sheen of things and what lies underneath. It is about beautiful and beautifully made things and other things that are supposed to be but aren’t. It is about authenticity and imitation, counterfeits, copies, facsimiles, and fakes. Robert Kanigel, Faux Real, Chapter One More about Robert Kanigel: Robert Kanigel is the author of the critically acclaimed The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Apprentice to Genius; and The One Best Way, a biography of efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor. He is a professor of science writing at MIT, where he directs its Graduate Program in Science Writing, and has been working with leather off and on for more than thirty years. http://robertkanigel.com/ https://videos.whiteblox.com/gnb/secure/player.aspx?sid=33014