Persian blue, pomegranate flower, spiny lobster, wine soup, pale flesh, dove breast, golden wax, grass green, green sand, rotten olive, modest plum, agate, rich French gray, gunpowder of the English...these are just some of the colour names of old fabric to fire the imagination. The Dyer's Handbook concerns a unique manuscript from the eighteenth century; a dyers memoirs from Languedoc, containing recipes for dyes with corresponding colour samples...