Chrome Tome

The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair (John Murray 2018)

This book is going to be good, I thought when I picked it up. So good that I felt an urge to write a glowing review of it before I’d read it. After all, it was going to combine two of my favorite things: colors and words. Just by flicking through it I could see that. There were sections with titles like “Amaranth” and “Chrome Yellow” and “Magenta” and “Emerald” and “Vantablack”. And each page of a section had a broad stripe of the relevant color down one edge. Colors and words! I was going to enjoy the book a lot and it would be one of the best I’d ever read.

And I did enjoy the book a lot. OK, it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, but it easily passed the test I apply to everything I read. Do I want to read it again? Yes, I do. It’s an instructive and entertaining book. The story of color is also the story of culture and clothing. In recent centuries, it’s the story of chemistry too. I’ve found myself looking at classical art in a new way since finishing the book, because Kassia St Clair writes a lot about painters and their search to find and fix new colors on canvas. But there are no illustrations in this book: just black type on white paper and pure strips or spots of color. Well, at the beginning of each chapter, the names of the colors are printed in the colors themselves. It doesn’t look very good or feel very good in the brain. I like the colors and the words to be separate, like flowers and bees. The words should buzz around the colors, sipping their nectar but never exhausting it.

And sometimes words desert a color and buzz off to another: the shifts in color-vocabulary are interesting. But even more interesting are the expansion in color-vocabulary and the different ways different languages divide the spectrum. Color is one of the joys of life and this book is a joy to read.

Advertisement