In 2018, I completed a personal project based on colors in books.
I catalogued every named color in dozens of books, from “red” and “black” to “malachite green” and “the softened colour of a dead leaf,” then assigned each a swatch so that every “brown” would be the same brown, and distinct from “deep brown” or “dark brown” or “gray-brown.”
The patterns that emerged surprised me. In the 19th-century books I looked at, named colors tend to describe clothes or facial features, almost never landscapes or interiors. Lush descriptive color language (“a mossy and vegetable green,” “runny-egg yellow”) is largely confined to later books. Other color grids struck me for their parallels with the books’ content: as soon as white missionaries enter Things Fall Apart, other colors fall away and white dominates. But the colors generally don’t map to plots or settings in the ways I thought they might; they tell a different story. I chose my ten favorites and produced them as a set of postcards.
Books included:
Emma by Jane Austen
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald (trans. Anthea Bell)
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (trans. Ann Goldstein)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
