The perfect addition to the quilt lab

What could be more perfect for me, than my latest find on ebay?   It is a 19th century book covered with a beautiful purple calico.  And guess what the subject matter of the book is?  Chemistry of course!

The title of the book is "A Laboratory Manual Containing Directions for a Course of Experiments in General Chemistry", by Ira Remsen, c.1890.  It is covered with this awesome purple calico, which we don't see often because the early purple dyes were not light-fast.  This book must have been stored away.  It has a few spots where the color has faded to tan but for the most part the purple remains, especially inside the cover.

Here's a view inside the cover.  You can see how the fabric and thread ties have stained the inner cover; this is a sign that this is an authentic antique piece, not an old book recently covered with fabric.  If you look closely on the left side, there is piece of filter paper (circle of paper) tucked under the fabric.  It too is stained by the purple fabric so it has been in there a long time.

As you can see, the student has written his notes for experiments 36, 37, and 38 on this page  He made soap bubbles filled with hydrogen and then lit them with a match.  What fun!

I read about purple dyes from the chemistry perspective a while ago and wrote a newsletter on the topic.  Here is an excerpt. 
Early natural purple dyes were not colorfast, often fading to a tan color in the presence of light. In 1856, William Henry Perkin, when he was only 18 years old, did a chemical reaction with a derivative of aniline (hence the term aniline dyes). Instead of throwing away the black junk that formed in the reaction, he extracted a purple compound, which he called mauve. It turns out that an impurity in his starting materials, gave rise mauve, the first stable purple dye. Like many discoveries in science, the accidental result turned out to be the most interesting result. This chemistry was the start of the synthetic dye industry, which eventually became dominated by German companies by the time of WWI.
Reference: Introduction to Organic Chemistry, A. Streitwieser and C. Heathcock, Macmillan Publishing Company, NY, c. 1985.