“‘This is Rita. We’re going to make her a dress glove, size four.
Black or brown, honey?’
    ‘Brown?’
    From a wrapped-up bundle of hides dampening beside
Harry, he picked one out in a pale shade of brown. ‘This is a tough
color to get,’ the Swede told her. ‘British tan. You can see, there’s
all sorts of variation in the color—see how light it is there, how dark
it is down there? Okay. This is sheepskin. What you saw in my office
was pickled. This has been tanned. This is leather. But you can still
see the animal. If you were to look at the animal,’ he said, ‘here it
is—the head, the butt, the front legs, the hind legs, and here’s the
back, where the leather is harder and thicker, as it is over our own
backbones. . . .’”

—Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 1997.