Gordon spotted our Minimalist Coloring Book at Chicago's Quimby's Bookstore, sitting next to The Famous Hairdos of Popular Music, volume three.  The pairing is apropos, for "a minimalist hairdo attracts attention and is very chic today" (Mark H. Ford, Self Improvement of Relationship Skills Through Body Language).

We were recently honored by these kind words:

"I confess I do not believe in time.  I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another." —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak: Memory

Vladimir Nabokov peers through a stained glass window:

"The most constant source of enchantment during those readings came from the harlequin pattern of colored panes inset in a whitewashed framework on either side of the veranda.  The garden when viewed through these magic glasses grew strangely still and aloof.  If one looked through blue glass, the sand turned to cinders while inky trees swam in a tropical sky.  The yellow created an amber world infused with an extra strong brew of sunshine.  The red made the foliage drip ruby dark upon a pink footpath.  The green soaked greenery in a greener green.  And when, after such richness, one turned to a small square of normal, savorless glass, with its lone mosquito or lame daddy longlegs, it was like taking a draught of water when one is not thirsty, and one saw a matter-of-fact white bench under familiar trees.  But of all the windows this is the pane through which in later years parched nostalgia longed to peer."  (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, p. 79)

Vladimir Nabokov offers our favorite tribute to the joys of coloring with a white crayon or pencil:

"The white one alone, that lanky albino among pencils, kept its original length, or at least did so until I discovered that, far from being a fraud leaving no mark on the page, it was the ideal implement since I could imagine whatever I wished while I scrawled." (Speak: Memory, revised edition, 1967)

See, of course, our own Minimalist Coloring Book.

This bright and cheerful September afternoon, with the strong greens and browns all around him and the ethereal, gentle misted tones of blue verging into violet in the distance.

—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, translated by Richard and Clara Winston

Thanks to the Master Organizing blog for featuring our bookshelves organized by color.

Here's Jesse's spot-on Prof. Oddfellow impression!  And it's true: our dictionary of magic words looks best when viewed through novelty eyewear.  Thanks for putting the hologram back into grammar, Jesse!

Over at an English tutorial website, we're delighted to see our rainbow bookcase illustrating this sentence: "I need to sort out my books."

His eyes were an improbably vivid sky blue, not made for looking outward but for steeping themselves in the cerulean essence of dreams.

—Bruno Schulz, “The Republic of Dreams”, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, 1934; translated by Celina Wieniewska.

In some unseen gorge a stream gurgled; a velvety green butterfly with black and yellow markings danced over white flowers; deep among the blue shadows of the trees a branch broke and leaves dropped heavily into leaves.

—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Pairs of great woodpeckers larger than crows, with flashing white bills and crimson crests afire in the sun, crossed the river in deep bounding flight, and hurtling flocks of small long- tailed parrots, bright green as new leaves in the morning light. The wild things were shining with spring colors and new sap and finally I was, too. I would sink my teeth into this morning land like a fresh peach.

—Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country, 2008.

"'If all the dew were diamonds,' Pablo said, 'we would be very rich.  We would be drunk all our lives.'"
—John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, 1935.  (via DJMisc)

I used to be color- blind / But I met you and now I find / There’s green in the grass / There’s gold in the moon / There’s blue in the skies

—Irving Berlin, “I Used to Be Color Blind”, 1938.

The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper, all tattered, it is true, and behind it, in the cracks, cockroaches swarmed in terrible numbers, so that there was an incessant rustling.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990

The gauges sizzled with blue light. Long sparks crackled along the wall. Somewhere a red light blinked, like a silent, threatening eye, and a vial behind Joachim's back was filled with a green glow. Then everything calmed down; the spectacle of lights vanished.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods. Mann is describing the workings of a primitive X-ray machine.