The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Claire

I really like color--I was drawn to quilting because of my love of fabric, but color is a big part of where I go as a quilter, but in reality I know very little about it. This year I took a class with Tara Faughnan at QuiltCon, and it really got me thinking about color and how little I really understand or know about it. This book is a part of my quest to better understand color, and hopefully not get too crazy on the the way that I lose my sense of what I love about it. I got this out of the library, but when I got about halfway through it, I bought a (used) copy of it. The book begins with an introduction on how we see and what colors actually are. The science behind the different interactions of dyes and pigments with light is actually very cool, as well as how this information is processed by the cellular machinery in our eyes and brain. This is followed with a small discussion on the history and language of color, which raises some interesting points such as the ancient Greeks not actually having a word for ‘blue’ and the implications of how the absence or presence of these descriptive words in a language shaped the perceptions of colors and the world at the time. The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing the members of 10 different color families. In a charming piece of design, the margin of each page is colored to match the subject, so don’t worry if you’re not confident differentiating your orchils from your heliotropes. Each family of colors is separated by two blank pages, showing a gradient composed of all the upcoming members in all their glory. The layout is a stroke of genius and each color only has one or two pages of accompanying text, making it a perfect book to pick up when you only have a few minutes--the stories that she tells about each color are very informative and entertaining, and the whole time I was reading it I was contemplating color and color choices that I make. This is a fun and approachable way to see and think about color.