Kory Stamper shows us her ‘True Color’

For those who love color — and who, other than the most monochromatically inclined Goth, doesn’t? — Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color – From Azure to Zinc Pink is a neuron-tingling psychedelia of delight. Who knew the twentieth century struggle to standardize the language of color could be so engaging? But Stamper’s journey through the doors of perception is more than mere history. It’s also an opportunity for a detective researcher to pull out the cold cases and a sympathetic narrator to tell a love story chock-full of quirky obsessives who seem to have wandered in from an Evelyn Waugh novel.

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True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color – From Azure to Zinc Pink  
By Kory Stamper
Penguin Random House; 320 pages

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Fittingly, given its release on the last day of Women’s History Month, True Color is dedicated to Margaret Godlove, a woman whose intellect and desire to contribute could not be contained by the conventions of her time. In many ways Stamper’s book is Godlove’s story and a long overdue recognition of the contributions to the world of color by one amazing, enigmatic woman.

Stamper wisely lures the reader into this complex tale by lacing it with intriguing historical anecdotes from the odd world of color. We learn the truth about Shakespeare’s reference in Henry IV to “puke stockings.” Turns out in the Bard’s time “puke” actually referred to the brown of a then-fashionable high quality cloth. The later emergence of an etymologically unrelated “puke” referring to regurgitation served as the death knell for this once common color term.

The chromatic quirkiness quotient reaches its zenith with Mummy Brown, a once very popular pigment made from — no joke — genuine ground Egyptian mummies, both human and animal. Due to evident ethical and sourcing issues the pigment was no longer produced after 1964. What took them so long?

While explaining the vital role 19th century dye makers played in the development of the modern chemical industry the author sketches out the ease with which pacific pre-WWI German dye factories transformed, with the advent of the war, into munitions plants. With practically no alterations, these color factories were soon, alongside their dyes, churning out deadly chlorine gas and explosives like 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene. This yellow crystalline solid, now known as TNT, spent the first thirty years of its existence masquerading as just another synthetic dye. No wonder those factories were always exploding.

Marketers’ crafty use of color descriptions to manipulate purchasers also comes under Stamper’s scrutiny. Cosmetics firm Helena Rubenstein’s 1950 promotion of its “Sensational Silken Lipstick” set of twelve almost identical shades of dark red lipstick each differentiated with promising monikers like “Crackerjack” and “Command Performance” is held out as a case in point. Why sell one tube of generic dark red lipstick when — with a pseudo-scientific color wheel and the sizzle of some evocative nomenclature — you can sell twelve? Mad Men aficionados may have flashbacks.

Perhaps, it’s inevitable that the most disturbing of Stamper’s disquisitions into the naming history of color and its socio-political repercussions circles back to racism. In 1911 an already problematic popular textile color which originated in France in the late 1870s known as tête-de-nègre was translated by American clothing merchants eager to appeal to a broader audience as the now unfathomable “’n-word’ brown.” By 1914, newspapers and advertising flyers were trumpeting this textile shade as “the most popular color in Dress Goods today.” However, even in Post-Reconstruction Era America the hurtful provocation did not go unchallenged. Clear thinking elements across the country voiced their objections. Among those was an African American paper called The New York Age which, in 1913, exhorted readers to boycott retailers who carried the color. While the offensive term’s popularity declined after 1914 its use in fashion circles tellingly and stubbornly continued into the 1950s.

Stamper balances her review of the role of color in art, commerce and society with forays into the intriguing science surrounding its perception. In her breezy omnivorous manner, she breaks down the phenomenon of color perception into its three easily digestible phases; addressing the physics, the biology and the psychology of the experience. She tells a story that goes beyond black and white, shouting out a newly created and as yet unnamed especially bright “ultra-white” which reflects almost all light as well as a nanotechnology derived “super black paint,” Vantablack — the darkest material ever made. With her bouncy prose Stamper wears her evident erudition lightly even while sharing with readers why metamers — trickster pairs of colors that look identical under one type of light source but completely different under another — are a nightmare for manufacturers.

In fact, much of the abundant humor to be found in the book derives from the ongoing conflict between the public’s everyday understanding of color and its much more complex scientific reality. This is particularly so in the often outlandish decades-long tug of war between fastidious color scientists and various oddball dictionary editors. Stamper, an admitted lexicographer, gleefully documents how the latter were determined to ensure color definitions reflect common usage – spectro-photometric measurements be damned. Characteristic of this conflict between what Starmer artfully describes as the “democratic chaos of language” and “the curated precision of science” was Irwin Priest’s initial 1929 refusal to even consider defining something as illogical as the color names used by the woefully uninformed public. In a letter to Paul Carhart, noted managing editor of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Priest who — as then head of the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS) Colorimetry Section — had been tapped to be the dictionary’s outside expert on color, haughtily dismissed popular color names as “fantastic and bizarre” and mere “arbitrary labels without logical or scientific basis.”

If Priest had his way colors would be defined solely through trichromatric measurements and diffuse spectral reflections ratios, nonsense like “winterberry” and “Oriental Poppy” would be left to the Sears Roebucks catalogues. This brought Priest into open conflict with Carhart whose dictionary, according to Starmer, aimed for “comprehensibility by the lowest common denominator of reader above all else.”

Thus the table was set for lexicographical battles over questions such as whether purple, which cannot be found on the visible electromagnetic spectrum, is a “real” color and whether the scientifically rigorous “red-yellow” was preferable to orange. Much ink was also spilt haggling over the true subtractive primary colors.

All informative and great fun. But where True Color really breaks new ground and finds its heart is in revealing Godlove’s heretofore unheralded contributions to the world of color. Until now, Godlove was best known as the wife of color wunderkind Dr. Isaac Hahn Godlove. Thanks to Stamper, readers can now follow Stamper’s dogged detective work as, through interviews and meticulous archival research, she slowly uncovers the truth: Dr. Godlove was so legendarily prodigious because he had an equally talented silent partner — his wife.

Stamper admiringly lays out how, from the 1940s, Godlove (Oberlin Class of 1927 BA in Chemistry) played a crucial role in her husband’s work and research and continued to do important work in the color field after he died. Notable achievements include playing an instrumental role in creating the Munsell Book of Color (Glossy Edition) published in 1958, one of the world’s most widely used color standards. Remarkably, it’s still in use for everything from car paint to plastics almost seventy years later. Godlove’s work for Munsell also led directly to the development of COMIC or Colorant Mixture Computer, the world’s first color-mixing computer which could analyze samples of paint or dyes and determine the mix to produce the same color. Its descendants can be seen in hardware store paint sections around the world.

In addition, wrangling the field’s notoriously persnickety precision instruments, Godlove produced hundreds of vital, carefully calibrated reference color chips for use by the authoritative NBS. Finally, and perhaps, most impressively, for a word nerd like Stamper, Godlove, in a voice “as flashy as a team of cabaret dancers,” “single-handedly” authored the thousands of color definitions to be found in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (Webster’s Third). The revered Webster’s Third is considered by many, and especially logophiles, the definitive record of 20th-century American English.

All this from a woman whose career ceiling in the corporate world was as patent clerk with knowledge of chemistry at DuPont. Fortunately, despite the sexism of the times that Stamper takes pains to point out, at DuPont she met Dr. Godlove. Fortunately, that is, for the world of color, since Margaret Noss quit formal employment for the more challenging role of working directly with her husband.

Characteristically, after her husband’s death the modest Godlove funded an NBS Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC) award for achievements in color science in Dr. Godlove’s name. Stamper makes clear the good-natured and collaborative Dr. Godlove considered his wife a full partner and a true equal. One doubts she would have put up with anything less. Perhaps, after reading this book, the ISCC will add her name to the award.