Last week I found myself in Rhode Island driving quite a bit and listening to WBUR. I was struck by a story on the invention of color and the origins of this book. The content’s quite relevant and I wanted to share:

To many people, the wide realm of color is relegated to the artistic corner of inquiry. Now that we can synthetically pull any hue out of our hats and tweak it to the finest degree, we’ve collectively forgotten the roots of color and the manner in which we have created pigments for millennia.

In Phillip Ball’s Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, we are brought into the folds of the fascinating history of color, and how the creation of pigments and dyes has had a lasting influence on art, fashion, merchandising, and the textile and chemical industries. If you have ever wondered to yourself “what exactly is color,” than this is the book for you. Ball clearly and enjoyably takes you through the ages and advances in pigment creation and describes how these steady achievements in color creation has affected contemporary society.