Grasse began with gloves, Northampton with boots

Old bindings in the workshop smell of hide, paste and something faintly sweet. I always wondered where the sweet came from.

UNESCO's entry on the perfume skills of Pays de Grasse says they've been practised there since at least the sixteenth century, in a region long known for leather tanning. Your gloves and their flowers are definately the same story, Ambrose [the history nerd in me is very happy].

Here's a thing. I'd never have put flowers and tanneries in the same breath, and now I'm thinking of the tannery smell my grandad brought home on his coat and the lavender my granny hung in the wardrobe to fight it and the pair of them doing Grasse in a council house in Galway, so they were. Two lines of the same tune.

A council house Grasse, I like that. Every tanner's wife would have known the trick.

The club's Class on perfume history gives later dates, from the town's own heritage sheet, for when the glovers split from the tanners' guild. A different event from the one in the encyclopedia, I think.

We get old kid gloves in the shop now and then. They smell of nothing much now, just dust and a bit of wax.

My dad's postbag was leather and it smelled of rain for thirty years. Never knew gloves got the perfume treatment.

The same Grasse article lists jasmine, rose, lavender and orange blossom among the town's flowers, which definitely beats tannery smell [sorry, Ambrose].

No offence taken. A good hide has its own perfume, ask any clicker. Should of brought one in to show you.

So the first perfumes there were for hands, not necks. That changes how I picture it.

ambrose_leather wrote:

A good hide has its own perfume

Agreed. My bench smells better than most shops.