News

Many organic dyes, what the eighteenth-century colour-makers called “vegetable” colors, are sensitive to the alkalinity or acidity of the dyebath.  I have elsewhere shared the range of bright reds and … Read More

I’ve been targeting a first-edition copy of Tristram Shandy just about since this project began.  I’m not a bibliophile.  This isn’t about author-love or the commoditization of old things.  I … Read More

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing up grant and fellowship proposals– or, maybe I should say “not writing them up,” since I’ve been finding ways to be productive … Read More

(Continued from Prussian Green and The Wind Furnace) Modern Prussian Blue is light-fast, chemically inert, and chromatically rich, so much so that it is still on modern painters’ palettes, for … Read More

Among Sir Isaac Newton’s papers are descriptions of a surprising number of furnaces.  Newton is best-known for the laws of physics which still bear his name; his three laws comprise … Read More

My reading these days includes a lot of Robert Boyle’s two essays on failure: “Of the Unsuccessfulness of Experiments,” and “Of Unsucceeding Experiments.”  They are similar in title, but not … Read More

I’ve taken a break from making more pigments to transform some of those pigments into watercolors—tiny, almost gemlike nuggets ready to be mixed with water and applied to paper.  I … Read More

I’ve started working on a category of pigments called “lakes,” a name for insoluble pigments made from organic dyes.  Virtually everything in nature gives some sort of color; it’s just … Read More

The curators at the University of Pennsylvania are close to agreeing to spray a single copy of the motley emblem with some high-energy x-rays.  We’re hoping the page will give … Read More

I recently returned from a trip to the rare books reading room at Princeton, and thought it was high time to collect a few thoughts about some of the things … Read More