Did we ever mention that our color palette "Moonlit Black Swan" is featured on page 166 of Color Inspirations?

"It struck me that it was different in colour": a black-and-white illustration from The Quiver, 1879.

"Poems come in two colors: grey and beige (ecru having been killed off a few years back)."
—Geof Huth

Try not to think about the purple elephant with green stripes.  This specimen was accidentally colorized by Google's scanning machine.  From McClure's magazine, 1904.  The "moire" the merrier!

"The pace of time depends on how it was lived; the present is black and white while the memory is blue."
—Gian Enzo Sperone: Torino-Roma-New York, 2000.

[For Jeff.]

"Golden sunshine, golden wine, golden hair, golden coin.  There is a magic charm in yellow, m'sieur.  Ah, but there is.  I know.  Red is bewitching; it is daring, inspiring.  But yellow—it enthuses, tantalizes, lulls."
—Izola L. Forrester, "The Yellow Domino," The Idler (1904)

We love this unspoken rainbow in Bananarama's song "Waterfall":


Similarly:

"You’ve painted time with an unspoken rainbow of gold." —T. Rue

In an amazing coincidence (or was it a coincidence?) our tech wizard friend Gordon (of Smart Home Hacks fame) sent us, without explanation, magic beads that turn color in sunlight -- an unspoken rainbow if we ever heard/saw one!  (See photo below.)

Meanwhile, did you know that "colored stripes of some description" is a Googlewhack?  For that matter, so is "mysterious colors in the air."

In a letter to historian and mocker of superstition William Harnett Blanch, the illumined Oscar Wilde wrote, "I love superstitions.  They are the colour element of thought and imagination  They are the opponents of common sense.  Common sense is the enemy of romance.  The aim of your society [a club serving 13 courses, with ladders to walk under, mirrors to break, black cats, and so forth] seems to be dreadful.  Leave us some unreality" (qtd. in Phil Baker's biography of Austin Osman Spare).

Gordon spotted our Minimalist Coloring Book at Chicago's Quimby's Bookstore, sitting next to The Penny Man.  The pairing is apropos, as minimalists surely have to watch their pennies.

An illustration from a 1910 issue of Hampton's magazine.  The caption reads: "Who can ever doubt the magic potency of black?"

"In the most blessed, the most beautiful state the human race can attain[,] [e]ach one of us would grow in a different way, no one would be like anyone else, everyone would be a crystal, would think and feel in different colours and images, would love and hate differently, as the spirit within wants us to.  It must have been Satan himself, the enemy of all colorful diversity, who thought up the slogan that all men are equal."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

Thanks to Dornob Designs for featuring three photos of our rainbow bookshelves in their piece entitled "Sublime Spectra: 3 Bookcases Neatly Sorted by Book Colors":

http://dornob.com/sublime-spectra-3-bookcases-neatly-sorted-by-book-colors/

Thanks to Myrna Mackenzie for featuring our color-coded bookshelves in her piece on "Amazing Bookcases":

http://www.myrnamackenzie.com/2011/06/amazing-bookcases.html

We're often asked why we organize our home library by color.  Truth be told, it's personal.  Our 3rd cousin 16 generations back, King Kenry VIII of England, organized the 329 volumes in his Greenwich Palace library by color.*

*This is noted in Katherine the Queen, Linda Porter's fascinating biography of Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII.

William Keckler marvels: "I tried to find a picture of a lime in lime light.  And I couldn't find a single photograph of this.  I felt like asking Google for a divorce.  All I wanted was to see a lime in a perfectly matching lime light, a lime camouflaged in lime light."

Ladies and gentlemen, we present an Internet first: an actual lime in limelight.

Nabokov suggests that the "ultimate vision is the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow.  This is, I believe, it:  not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another."  (Transparent Things)