America's Indigo Blues

Book excerpt: "This book represents an achievement in compiling and putting into order all the facts discovered in an intensive four-year study. Included is an important study of 'Indigofera tinctoria', the beautiful but malodorous dye plant, indigo; the tale reads like a novel and is the complete study in book form of the strange dye plant and of the uses of the blue dye. The book, enhanced by Mrs. Pettit's understanding of techniques and by authoriatative and scholarly facts gleaned from New England archives, also gives a lively picture of the eigteenth-century dyer's and printer's life as an artisan in the American colonies." - book jacket.