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Review: The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St. Clair

Can I confess something? When I see people like Elizabeth tearing through their Mount TBRs like it’s going out of style, I become very embarrassed about my own terrible TBR habits. The trouble is that I own the books I own! The books I check out from the library will be due back in a few weeks! How can I prioritize the books with no deadline over the books with a deadline? I can’t! That would be nuts!

Of course, when I do make time for the books that I own but haven’t read, I rarely regret it. I bought Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour when I was in London with Mumsy and Alice, in the Notting Hill branch of Daunt Books, a shop whose bags Alice and I had seen so many times during our stay in London that we were starting to feel like we wouldn’t be true Londoners if we did not acquire a Daunt Books bag.

Well, for one thing, Daunt Books is a damn treasure — and we weren’t even in the main branch! We were in a satellite branch! When I go into an independent bookstore, the first most important thing that I desire is for its selection to feel curated. Daunt Books had that in spades, plus an organizing principle that nods to its primary function as a travel bookstore and makes a shopper feel urbane as hell: The books are organized by country, where each country’s section begins with phrasebooks, dictionaries, and travel guides, branches out into history, and finishes up with literature from that country. I was so deeply in love that I bought three books I didn’t need and barely had room for; when I got home Mumsy was like “uhhhhhh are you going to be within the weight limit for checked bags?” and I was like “lol we’ll see!” (I was.)

The Secret Lives of Colour was the book I purchased solely because of its beauty, and I rejoice to report that it’s as brilliant as it is beautiful. You can see why Daunt Books, my new favorite indie bookstore,1 selected it for inclusion in its inventory. St Clair cycles through the color wheel telling stories of colors that stood the test of time, colors history forgot how to make, and colors that would literally kill you.

(Stop spelling the word “color” two different ways, Jenny!)

Some things I learned from this book include: Half of China’s current ivory supply comes from woolly mammoth tusks that have been unearthed because the damn polar ice caps are melting; everyone in ancient Egypt lined their eyes with kohl because everyone looks great in eyeliner;2 and people will pay just about any price and kill any number of innocent beetles to have beautiful dyes for their clothes. Oh, and it was a hell of a life trying to be a painter in olden times because half your colors were trash and the other half cost all the money you had in the world.

The Secret Lives of Colour makes perfect bedtime reading in (I swear I use this phrase in every post now, but I want y’all to know that I would be so excited if it no longer applied and I would terminate its use with extreme prejudice if I could) these troubled times. St Clair tells short, charming, weird stories of paints and dyes and pigments, and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

PS the margins of each page have a swatch of the color currently under discussion. I love this book. I am so happy I bought it. Thanks, London.

  1. Full disclosure, any indie bookstore that surprises me with their selection becomes my new favorite indie bookstore. It is getting hard to keep track of all the indie bookstores I have pledged my sword to.
  2. Okay, I already sort of knew that, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to remind y’all that all genders look amazing with eyeliner and it’s weird we only want girls to wear it.