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I’m always on my guard when I start reading a "commodity history". In many cases this is an endless accumulation of facts and anecdotes, often unsystematic and - what is worse - without critical screening. I had bad experiences with Mark Kurlansky's books (especially the one about Salt, Salt: A World History). But this seems to me of a different kind. Obviously this is not a science book, and Finlay is the first to admit. All in all, this is a mixed alternation of scientific information, personal travel stories, anecdotes, and even historical fiction. I only have a problem with the latter, for example when she imagines how a Jew, a violin maker expelled from Spain, roams Europe in the late 15th century in search of orange-coloured varnish. But otherwise this book stands for a very pleasant and informative read with usually also the necessary critical sense.

Finlay opens up the wonderful world of colours to such an extent that from now on you can no longer look at the colour texture of objects with a blank mind: there is always a sometimes very surprising history behind it. “If you open up a box of paints, there are numerous such stories hidden inside it. They are stories of sacredness and profanity, of nostalgia and innovation, of secrecy and myth, of luxury and texture, of profit and loss, of fading and poison, of cruelty and greed, and of the determination of some people to let nothing stop them in the pursuit of beauty.�

Finlay focusses on traditional and artisanal dyes and fabrics: namely those that were extracted from pigments of plants, animals, minerals or ordinary soil, often after a very intensive process that also regularly involved rotting. It is a wonderful world of secret recipes, carefully shielded monopolies and sometimes intense trade over thousands of kilometres. Apparently, this whole machinery came to an end around the middle of the 19th century, quite suddenly, with the discovery of synthetic dyes, usually extracted from coal tar. They were so successful, and so much cheaper, that they almost wiped traditional paints off the map, in a way that many of the recipes just disappeared. They are now being rediscovered little by little, and that also Finlay zooms in on.

In short, this is a very informative book, which actually focuses more on dye than on colour, although the latter determines the content of the book, divided in about 10 defining colours. I have learned a lot from it. The only major flaw I see is the lack of illustrations, at least in the edition I had. There is a small colour section, but that is more than insufficient. To say it with a pun: this book really screams for colour!