Recommended Books

Foundational Science of Color

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  The Physics and Chemistry of Color: The Fifteen Causes of Color

  Kurt Nassau · 1983 (1st ed.)

  A primary reference for this exhibit and the only book that treats every mechanism of color — from band-gap and ligand-field theory to dispersion, scattering and diffraction — in one volume. Academic; assumes some chemistry and physics. The 2nd edition (ISBN 0471391069, 2001) is the current printing.

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  The Physics and Chemistry of Color (2nd Edition)

  Kurt Nassau · 2001 (Wiley Series in Pure & Applied Optics)

  The updated edition of Nassau’s classic, with revised treatments of luminescence and incandescence. Same fifteen-cause framework as the 1983 original. Academic.

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  Light and Color in Nature and Art

  Samuel J. Williamson & Herman Z. Cummins · 1983

  The standard undergraduate textbook bridging optical physics and visual experience: rainbows, halos, holography, color television, stage lighting and pigment chemistry. Academic but approachable.

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  Billmeyer and Saltzman’s Principles of Color Technology (4th Edition)

  Roy S. Berns · 2019

  The working reference for industrial colorimetry — CIE color spaces, color difference formulas, spectrophotometry, color management. Academic; the standard text in color-science programs.

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Light, Vision, and the Outdoors

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  Color and Light in Nature

  David K. Lynch & William Livingston · 2001 (2nd ed., Cambridge)

  An astronomer and an atmospheric physicist explain almost every optical phenomenon you can see with the naked eye: rainbows, halos, mirages, sunsets, the green flash, why mountains glow at twilight. General reader.

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  Light and Color in the Outdoors

  Marcel Minnaert (trans. L. Seymour) · 1993 (Springer)

  The expanded English edition of Minnaert’s 1937 classic, De natuurkunde van ‘t vrije veld. Eight hundred numbered observations — shadow bands, dappled light, the colors of distant hills — that taught a generation of physicists how to look. General reader to intermediate.

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  Color in Nature: A Visual and Scientific Exploration

  Penelope A. Farrant · 1999

  A photo-rich tour of the colors of the universe, atmosphere, minerals, plants and animals. Answers why snow is white, leaves green, water blue and zebras striped. General reader.

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  How to Use Your Eyes

  James Elkins · 2000 (Routledge)

  A guided tour of thirty-two everyday things most of us overlook — pavement cracks, sunsets, postage stamps, the inside of the eye. Only one chapter is explicitly about color, but the whole book changes how you see. General reader.

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  QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

  Richard P. Feynman · 1985 (Princeton Science Library, 2014 ed.)

  Feynman’s four Mautner Lectures, in which he explains quantum electrodynamics — reflection, refraction, the partial reflection from a sheet of glass — without a single equation. General reader; indispensable.

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  Light: A Very Short Introduction

  Ian A. Walmsley · 2015 (Oxford)

  A 144-page primer on what light is — particle, wave, both — and how we use it, from Newton through lasers, quantum cryptography and LIGO. General reader.

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  Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind

  Arthur Zajonc · 1995 (Oxford paperback)

  A quantum physicist’s history of how human beings have tried to understand light, weaving Goethe and Newton with modern optics and the strange experimental fact that the eye must in some sense learn to see. General reader.

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Color, Vision and Perception

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  Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (Updated & Expanded)

  Margaret Livingstone (foreword by David Hubel) · 2014

  A Harvard neurobiologist explains why Mona Lisa’s smile flickers, why Pointillist paintings shimmer, and how cone sensitivities and lateral inhibition govern what painters can do with color. General reader with real science.

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  Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow (Expanded Edition)

  C. L. Hardin · 1988 (expanded 1993, Hackett)

  The standard philosophical treatment of what color is: physical reflectance, neural code, or experienced quality? Awarded the Johnsonian Prize. Academic but very readable.

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Pigments, Dyes and the Cultural History of Color

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  Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World

  Simon Garfield · 2002 (Norton)

  In 1856 the eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Perkin, trying to synthesize quinine from coal-tar, accidentally produced the first aniline dye. Garfield tells the story of how it built the modern organic-chemicals industry. General reader.

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  Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color

  Philip Ball · 2003 (Univ. of Chicago paperback)

  A chemist-turned-science-writer traces every major pigment from Egyptian blue to phthalocyanine green, and shows how the available palette has shaped what painters could paint. General reader; the best single volume on pigment chemistry for non-specialists.

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  Color: A Natural History of the Palette

  Victoria Finlay · 2003

  Finlay travels the world — to ochre mines in Australia, lapis quarries in Afghanistan, cochineal farms in Mexico — in pursuit of the materials behind ten classic pigments. General reader.

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  The Secret Lives of Color

  Kassia St. Clair · 2017

  Seventy-five short essays on individual hues — lead white, Indian yellow, Vantablack, fluorescent pink — each pairing a cultural anecdote with the chemistry that makes the color possible. General reader.

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