“Stamper takes readers on an uproarious journey into Merriam-Webster’s somber early-20th-century office and the decades-long, behind-the-scenes kerfuffle over the seemingly simple task of defining colors… Stamper depicts the esoteric editorial wrangling and nitpicking with verve, bringing a self-serious, cloistered world to vivid life. She also poignantly profiles the devoted relationship between Godlove and his equally brilliant wife Margaret, who finished his work after his death… Stamper writes with grace and a delightful sense of humor, particularly when making fun of her own camp… A scintillating journey into the prismatic heart of a subject that ‘touch[es] everything.’”
—Publishers Weekly, starred
“In a narrative voice I can best describe as simultaneously cozy, chatty, raucous, and intensely authoritative, the great Kory Stamper guides us through a modern history of the tortuous attempts, as they played out at the Merriam-Webster dictionary company, to quantify and define, in words, something that seems to resist both quantification and definition (in words): color. And it’s an enthralling journey, including, amid a prickly dramatis personae, its centerpiece portrait of Isaac Hahn Godlove, a brilliant scientist drafted into the lexicography business, one of the most fascinating people you’ve surely never heard of before. True Color is wildly entertaining and bountifully informative; I couldn’t have enjoyed myself more.”
—Benjamin Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer’s English
“Color is a secret, maddening, and hilarious language, and Kory Stamper defines it brilliantly.”
—Simon Garfield, author of Mauve
“An interesting and witty book about how black-and-white dictionaries cope with the complexity of color, True Color shows that the history of the visual spectrum is inextricable from the history of lexicography.”
—Adam Aleksic, New York Times bestselling author of Algospeak
“A delightful romp through the irrepressible, slippery, and often confounding world of color and lexicography, supported by an appropriately colorful cast of characters.”
—Kassia St. Clair, author of The Secret Lives of Color
“Funny, illuminating, and meticulously researched. I’ve been waiting for this book for twelve years and I was still blown away by what’s inside.”
—Gretchen McCulloch, New York Times bestselling author of Because Internet
“Lively… Filled with opinionated, insistent, stubborn characters who devoted their lives to accuracy… A fresh, irreverent history of words.”
—Kirkus
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