Our spectral bookcase was honored as "Bookshelf of the Week" at RobAroundBooks.  Rob says he "can’t envisage any hardcore bibliophile storing their libraries like this.  It must be hugely impractical!"  But consider the Serif of Nottingblog's viewpoint: "What you've done privileges the unexpected connections between books, between subjects.  Despite your blog being 'Abecedarian,' your book organization realizes that knowledge can be organized or accessed via a totally different set of assumptions."

Our bookcase was also featured at The Book Chook a few weeks ago.

The hair of most so- called redheads actually is orange, but it was red, first color in the spectum and the last seen by the eyes of the dying, it was true- blue red that clanged like fire bells about the domes of Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Princess Leigh- Cheri.
—Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980.

Beats look cooler than any other Bohemian. They are the toughest, most tautly attired of all the Bohemians. Indigo, white, putty and black are the main colors, black being the most dominant. Black jeans, black jackets, black wingtips, black sneakers, black ballet slippers, black berets, black sweaters, black shirts, black coffee. . . .

Outerwear is generally the same for Beats of all sexes and will include a trench coat in black, navy or beige, a camel’s- hair coat from a thrift shop ar a navy blue peacoat. A corduroy jacket may appear from time to time in the academic as well as the non- academic Beat wardrobe. This will be brown, forest green or burgundy.
—Laren Stover, Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, 2004.

---

Jeff wrote:

Then Grandfather would begin to speak of the dreams that would visit him so often as time wore on. ... He'd been dreaming in blue, he'd say: the rain in his dream was the deepest blue, midnight blue, and it was this never- ending blue rain that made his hair and his beard grow even longer.
—Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, translated by Maureen Freely, 2006

---

Marjo Moore writes:

What he saw, not only of reality but even in his imagination, was often blurred by fever, but within that vague dimness his cancer appeared to him as a flourishing bed of yellow hyacinths or possibly chrysanthemums bathed in a faint, purple light.
—Kenzaburo Oé, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, translated by John Nathan, 1977.

The sunsets in that African hell proved to be fabulous. They never missed. As tragic every time as a monumental murder of the sun! . . . For a whole hour the sky paraded in great delirious spurts of scarlet from end to end; after that the green of the trees exploded and rose up in quivering trails to meet the first stars. Then the whole horizon turned gray again and then red, but this time a tired red that didn’t last long. That was the end. All the colors fell back down on the forest in tatters, like streamers after the hundredth performance. It happened every day at exactly six o’clock.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey To The End Of The Night, 1934, translated by Ralph Manheim, 1983.

"We are all like snowflakes."
—comedian Lewis Black

More and more as I grow older I see the beautiful dream of life expanding till it is much more important than gray life itself — a dark, red dream the color of the cockatoo.
—Jack Kerouac, Journal, July 4, 1949; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.

---

Rick Dale writes:

Very cool post!  Thank you!   Perhaps you'd enjoy my Kerouac-obsessed blog at www.thedailybeatblog.blogspot.com.

There are two types of comedian . . . both deriving from the circus, which I shall call the White Face and the Red Nose. Almost all comedians fall into one or the other of these two simple archetypes. In the circus, the White Face is the controlling clown with the deathly pale masklike face who never takes a pie; the Red Nose is the subversive clown with the yellow and red makeup who takes all the pies and the pratfalls and the buckets of water and the banana skins. The White Face represents the mind, reminding humanity of the constant mocking presence of death; the Red Nose represents the body, reminding mankind of its constant embarrassing vulgarities. . . . The emblem of the White Face is the skull, that of the Red Nose is the phallus. One stems from the plague, the other from the carnival. The bleakness of the funeral, the wildness of the orgy. The graveyard and the fiesta. The brain and the penis. Hamlet and Falstaff. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Laurel and Hardy.
—Eric Idle, The Road To Mars, 1999.

Sometimes Yakov lost sight of the words. They were black birds with white wings, white birds with black wings. He was falling in thoughtless thought, a stupefying white- ness.
—Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, 1966.

---

Jeff writes:

The man had on a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie, all of the same degree of cheapness, and all worn out to the same degree. The color of the suit was reminiscent of an amateur paint job on an old jalopy. The deep wrinkles in the pants and jacket looked as permanent as valleys in an aerial photograph. The white shirt had taken on a yellow tinge, and one button on the chest was ready to fall off. It also looked one or two sizes too small, with its top button open and the collar crooked. The tie, with its strange pattern of ill- formed ectoplasm, looked as if it had been left in place since the days of the Osmond Brothers. Anyone looking at him would have seen immediately that this was a man who paid absolutely no attention to the phenomenon of clothing.
—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

Claggart deliberately advanced within short range of Billy, and mesmerically looking him in the eye, briefly recapitulated the accusation. Not at first did Billy take it in. When he did the rose- tan of his cheek looked struck as by white leprosy. He stood like one impaled and gagged. Meanwhile the accuser’s eyes, removing not as yet from the blue, dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet colour blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence losing human expression, gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd, 1924.

I felt the eye of the forest staring at me from among cedars, pines, and several species of cypress, all of a green so murky that one perceived it almost as black.
—Kenzaburo Oé, The Silent Cry, translated by John Bester, 1974.

There were Saturday mornings when a muddy brown pool was joyous to the test of squatting kids . . . as dewy and mornlike as brown mud water can get, — with its reflected brown taffy clouds —
—Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax, 1959.

The bluish shadows gave the place a ghostly ambiance.
—Dan Brown, Digital Fortress, 2004.

---

Jeff writes:

Referring to our bookcase arranged by spine color, the Serif of Nottingblog wrote: "What you've done privileges the unexpected connections between books, between subjects.  Despite your blog being 'Abecedarian,' your book organization realizes that knowledge can be organized or accessed via a totally different set of assumptions."

The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the wood- gate, a fine ribbon of pink.
—D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928.

Toward the end of the afternoon, a mauve mist veils the avenues so that you do not know where they end, and the unexpected discovery of a wild hyacinth, with its three slender bells of artless blue swaying in the wind, has all the charm of a stolen joy.
—Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

Evil is not a primary color. That is the point of the Wachowski brothers' video- arcade treatment of "Speed Racer," insofar as one can be determined. Blue, you can trust. Red and yellow, black and white — they're all decent visible wavelengths. It's purple you have to watch out for.

—Jim Emerson, a review of "Speed Racer"

Where the blue of the night / Meets the gold of the day, / Someone waits for me.
—Bing Crosby, Roy Turk & Fred Ahlert, "Where the Blue of the Night," 1931.