Book Title: Methuen Handbook of Colour
Author: A. Kornerup & J.H. Wanscher
ISBN: 0-413-33400-7
Category: Reference
Format: Hardback
Summary: Wait..a book on colour in our reviews? It's relevant because the Windsock folks have been using Methuen colour references for many years. It was originally produced in 1961 in Copenhagen, but has seen two other editions: 1967 and 1978. I'm looking at a 1989 reprint. (I'm using the British spelling of "colour" throughout this review for consistency.)
The book starts with a few pages of explanation but then it launches into the core of the book: thirty two-page spreads of colour selections, each with an 8x6 grid of colours, for a total of 1,440 colours (though the bottom "1" row is the same on each grid, so there are 1266 unique colours in all).
Each grid starts with a saturated primary colour in the upper left (A8). From top to bottom the primary colour is printed in increasingly lighter colour until reaching white on every page in the A1 position. From left to right the colours are overprinted in a transparent grey ink of darker and darker intensity (A through F). The F Colour is dark but not full black, which would have been in the "I" column, so you have to extrapolate if you want to imagine the "G" and "H" columns. (IMHO the jump from "E" to "F" is a little too large.)
The latter half of the book tries to assign names to sections of the colours and to individual colours. This is a strange bit of imprecision added to an otherwise orderly book, but the descriptions can be interesting, e.g. 20B6 is "Delphinium Blue, The colour of the flowers of the larkspur plant" while 27B8 is "Emerald Green, The Colour of the precious stone of he same name. The emeralds of old which were mined in the vicinity of the Red Sea were comparatively lighter in colour. This name has also been applied to the pigment hydrated chromium oxide..."
The last part of the book compares the colors to British paints (circa 1987) and ink colours. In the back there is a pocket for a cardboard slip with three square cutouts: one for your sample colour on (say) a piece of cloth and two for sliding over book colours, to keep the colour selection process to a series of "A" or "B" choices.
Had the Windsock folks never used it, the Methuen book would be an interesting but forgotten (and expensive) find at a used book store. Instead, it's the foundation of our references for WWI colour.
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