The Secret Lives of Color. My sweet husband Rob gave me a book for…
By: Jennie Nash
Tags: Books And Authors, Inspiration, Writing, Book Recommendations, Books

My sweet husband Rob gave me a book for Christmas that he heard about on a podcast and thought I might like.

But giving a book to someone and asking them to spend time and attention and energy on it is an act of such intimacy and audacity. I’ve been married to Rob for almost 31 years and even I had a tiny internal eye roll when I saw that he had given me a book. Like, “Really — you’re going to give ME a book? Me who reads books all day long for a living? ME who reads books all night long because there are so many I want and need to read for my work and my life? ME who has books stacked everywhere in a scattered TBR file? ME who doesn’t have a spare minute?”

Note that I said internal eye roll, above. You don’t stay married for 31 years without learning something about when to keep your mouth shut. I also love to give books as gifts and frequently do so to both family and friends so it’s not like I can hold a double standard in this regard. So I smiled and thanked him and dutifully asked him where he had heard about the book (99% Invisible), and then I took the book and put it in the stack and thought I might get around to looking at it one day.

That day came this week and when I cracked open The Secret Lives of Colors by Kassia St Clair, I literally gasped. It is an object of incredible beauty — which in the age of e-books, means that a great many people lavished a lot of money and attention on it. Those little dots on the cover are raised and shiny — I knew that much — as well as the fact that they used very thick paper because the book is heavy. The shock was inside, where the Table of Contents was printed in every single color written about — 75 colors printed there. And there are colored bars on the edge of the pages where each color story begins in the book, forming a deep rich rainbow on the page edges. Certain page spreads are saturated with color.

Before reading a word about what the book was even about, I was eagerly trying to figure out who the author was who warranted this level of detail, and what her deal was.

Turns out she is a cultural historian who has been writing about the history of color for many years for publications such as The Economist, House & Garden, and Quartz, and in a long-running column for Elle Decoration.

Already loving her — a cultural historian with an expertise in color?? — I turned back to the TOC to see the most gorgeous structure. I am obsessed with the way books are shaped and structured — with how the material flows, and how it was curated and edited, and what the form of the work tells us about its function. When I am working with a nonfiction client to transform the fuzzy idea that’s stuck in their head into a powerful message that can be pressed into a reader’s hands and consumed, the bulk of what I am doing is helping them think about how to contain their idea, how to define it, how to edit it, which is to say that we are in the business of structure.

I could read TOCs all day long and sometimes do when doing research on behalf of a client. My favorites ones are the ones that tell you in an instant what the book is — the whole story in just one glance. A book like Michael Pollan’s Cooked does this or The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. I just love that kind of power and clarity, because it can only come from someone with deep experience wrestling with an idea.

The TOC of The Secret Lives of Color is nothing more than a list of colors printed in the colors they represent. Outside of the context of the book, printed in black and white on a piece of paper, it would literally just be a meaningless list of colors. But within the context of the book, it raises so many questions — the good kind of questions you want your reader to be asking, such as “Why these colors? And what on earth could the author possibly say about so many colors that would warrant the writing of the book?”

With these thoughts in mind, I turned to the introduction, where St. Claire writes:

“What I have tried to do is provide something between a potted history and a character sketch for the 75 shades that have intrigued me the most. Some are artists’ colors, some are dyes, and others are almost more akin to ideas or sociocultural creations.”

I didn’t even know what a potted history was when I read those words, but I could guess that it wasn’t good, wasn’t something to be desired; it sounded like plodding, or stuck. But a character sketch of a color? Yes, please, give me that. What a concept! What an imagination that came up with that idea! What a fantastic premise for a book.

(And I was right — “A potted history is brief, a quick summary. Potted meat is meat, usually not of the highest quality, processed and preserved in a tin. The expression is often used in a derogatory way.” — English.stackexchange.com)

Not even 300 words into the experience of this book, and I was taken in, hook, line, and sinker. Suddenly, I was holding in my hands my favorite kind of book — a book about creativity. But it’s also about fashion and art and chemistry and science and politics and geography. There is intrigue and thievery and scandal running like an electric current through the stories.

It’s written in such a way that you want to dog-ear the pages, even though you would never actually dare (and I am a devoted dog-ear-er of pages!) You keep running across sentences like this:

“Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream.”

I believe I have mentioned it to ten people in 3 days, and now I am sharing it with you. The term “it speaks volumes” comes to mind. It’s just one book but it contains so much within it that is worth thinking about and sharing.

No one needs this book.

There is no agent who said on Manuscript Wish List, “Bring me all your nonfiction books about the cultural history of color.”

There is no reader who said, “What I really want is an expensive book that teaches me something about color.”

But the author was nonetheless thinking of me or someone like me when she crafted her book. She was thinking about who would care, why they would care, and how she could delight them. She was probably thinking about fashion designers and graphic designers and artists and photographers, and maybe dancers and poets, and maybe scholars and other writers, and maybe book coaches.

I am just so tickled that the author wrote it and that my husband was bold enough and wise enough to know that I would love it.

Aren’t you dying to write a book that one day hits someone like that? I hope you are deeply engaged in it right this very moment. And I hope you don’t stop until it’s as close to your vision as you can make it.