Colors. The Story of Dyes and Pigments :: Education by Design Store

Customer Reviews

When colors are boring

2008-02-08
I was so looking forward to receiving this book that when it arrived I immediately started to read. What a disappointment. It was full of fairly useless information and not at all entertaining or a joy to read which I'd expected it to be. I've given it a rating of 2 but had to think long and hard to even go that high.

A LOT of information packed into a deceptively small package.

2006-03-21
_Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments_, is an excellent little book to read if you are interested in colors. It covers pre-history up through the modern era, and it discusses some of the chemistry, much of the mineralogy, and a lot of the economics & politics that went into the use of different dyes & pigments through the eons.

It is also lavishly illustrated, with many many photos, including photos of famous works of art, close-up photos showing artistic techniques, photos of artists' materials, and photos of historical treatises relating to cloth dyeing and other skills. There is a lot of good technical content, including explanations of the differences between dyes, pigments and lakes, and details of attempts in antiquity to create artificial colors, going as far back as the Egyptians.

The chapters are Painting & Dyeing, which covers paints and dyes from antiquity to the Middle Ages; Colors in the Middle Ages, which covers new technological & economic developments in the Middle Ages; The Explosion of Supply and Demand, which covers how the increased trade of the Renaissance, Enlightenment Era, and the Industrial Age drove the search for new colors; and The Triumph of Industrial Chemistry, which describes how colors are made today.

There is also a chapter titled Documents, which has excerpts from a number of historical works about dyes & pigments, and that chapter alone is worth the price of the book. The bibliography is also excellent.

It was a bit slow in places, and since it was originally written in French, there is a certain flow to the text that is subtly different from many contemporary books written by native English speakes. But, the differences are not unpleasant, and for the most part the text is very engaging.

I did notice that it repeats the statement that India Yellow was made from the concentrated urine of cows who at only mangoes, and according to Victoria Finlay in _Color: A Natural History of the Palette_, that provenance is mythical. But that was the only jarring note I found in the entire work.

A treasure chest of interesting trivia

2001-10-16
I am a Color Manager for one of the worlds largest paint companies and even though I have been working with pigments for 15 years I have found this book to be a treasure chest of interesting trivia that I didn't know or had long forgotten.
But this book is not just for chemists. If you are like me interested in art, especially paintings, you will find that this book gives you a wealth of information and facts that one can use to better understand the development of art through the centuries.
I can highly recommend this beautifully illustrated booklet which is fun to read to everybody (not just color nerds like me).