British tan

“‘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.