Shoddy

The history of modern-day old clothes recycling begins with a thing called shoddy. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as "the devil" and then re-used. Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling.

Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. Usually undisclosed, shoddy-also known as reworked wool-became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue.In Shoddy: From Devil's Dust to the Renaissance of Rags, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a journey to discover shoddy, from Haiti to the "shoddy towns" of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into