Lyon's silk contributed for several centuries to the fame of a region beyond the oceans. Numerous documents have remained which describe this activity from a historical or sociological point of view and our ambition is not to approach the subject under one of these angles, others, certainly more competent than ourselves, have contributed to this collective memory. We wanted to deal with another aspect of this theme that is dearer to our heart and that we know better. In this work, we will examine the angle of technological memory. We have found that, apart from a few extremely rare books in the French language, such as the Treatise on the fabrics of Falcot (1844) or the Art of the silk maker of Paulet (1777), no technical book talks about the workshop of the Lyonnais in the 19th century Century. The Encyclopédie de Diderot and d'Alembert, as well as the Paulet, interesting as they are, describe an earlier technology than that which concerns us, and moreover did not seem to us to approach things sufficiently in depth. Our intention is to limit the scope of our remarks but to develop them as completely as possible. We have tried to fill this gap by writing this book, the content of which has not been defined at random, but with a view to helping to make available to the public as widely as possible a precise and abundantly illustrated description of the workshop of the silk hand loom weaver from Lyons, and a few silk-weaving techniques, deliberately limited to the art of velvet, intended merely to concretize our work, this work not dealing with the study of fabrics.Particular attention has been paid to trying to make this book a popular book that is accessible to all, which gives to see and understand rather than to learn and finally which can be a documentary source for the media. It seemed appropriate to this book to write an article on the history of Lyon's silk so that the reader can situate the chronology and sociological context of our remarks. Finally, we shall find in the last part a dictionary of silk, a compilation of terms used in the world of silk or belonging to the hand loom weaver's jargon.

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This book, written in 2013 by the author of this site, who was a hand loom silk weaver in Lyon, is a book of popularization accessible to all, which gives to see and understand rather than to learn, and has ambition to be a documentary source, heritage trace of an endangered trade.