JF Ptak Science Books Post 2481
Earlier in this blog appeared a happy little post of odd uses of color to illustrate color, black and white to illustrate color, and nothing to illustrate something called "Three Map Fits: a Color Map with Color and No Map, a Color Map in Black & White; AND a Black & White Map in White (only)" here. There was an appearance there of a small pamphlet by Albert Coble (Games of Colors, Kindergarten and Primary Exercises). on the uses of color in kindergartens in which color exercises were presented though no color was actually employed in the illustration, though the general arrangement is clear enough:
It is a happy thing that there is a second Coble pamphlet on hand (!, Color Exercises (The Coble Color Tests) Instructions for Primary and Kindergarten Work, 1923 ) and this one though still in black and white now has color designations:
The idea that Coble is writing about (color and kids and the education of young children in the different forms/varieties of color and how colors are produced) is very interesting, and no doubt that the set of color blocks used in the exercises would have been lovely in themselves, but I think the author would have made more headway had he had at least one color illustration.
That said, the world of black & white and grays is a lovely one, and as long as we're talking about black & white in color, let's look at a pamphlet that is all about black & black. Egyptian Lacquer Manufacturing Company ("Rockefeller Center, NY, NY") specialized in heavy industrial paints and published some small but fine catalogs to sell their services and products. One of them, Egyptian Black Lacquer for Industrial Products (1938) contains a paint chip plate to compare its various blacks. There is nothing finer, really, than a really black black, an all-out black, a midnight-and-no-light-source black, a B-1 stealth bomber black, a Sommerfeld black. And Egyptian comes really close to a good solid black black, what they called their "dead black". I can't reproduce it here and give this black any justice, as it is hard to reproduce a black with no lustre that isn't that lacquer/paint itself--but trust this writer, these blacks in real life are as differentiated as their names imply:
And that dead black? They mean it. Or meant it.
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