The author is joined by Princeton Public Library’s humanities specialist Cliff Robinson to discuss her new book True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color-from Azure to Zinc Pink. Book signing to follow.

A kaleidoscopic journey through the secret history of hues—and the story of the obsessive genius behind the definitions of colors we use today, from the author of Word by Word.

What could “bluer than fiesta” possibly mean? While editing dictionaries for Merriam-Webster, Kory Stamper found herself drawn again and again to the whimsical color definitions in "Webster’s Third New International Dictionary"—especially when compared to the dry and impersonal entries that filled the rest of the volume. Stamper couldn’t help but wonder: Who was the voice behind these peculiar definitions?

Meet I. H. Godlove, an erratic but brilliant up-and-coming scientist who was one of the experts Merriam-Webster hired in 1930 to help revise the dictionary to reflect a rapidly modernizing world. His fascinating life mirrors the wild and winding journey that color science, color psychology, and color production took through the twentieth century. Stamper tracks these industries as they move into the atomic age and intertwine in strange and surprising ways, spanning two world wars and involving chemical explosions, an unexpected suicide, dramatic office politics, and an extraordinary love story.

Filled with captivating facts about color words and colors themselves—did you know that the word “puke” used to refer to a fashionable shade of reddish-brown before it was associated with vomit?—and fueled by Stamper’s inexhaustible curiosity, True Color will transform the way you see the world, from black-and-white to Technicolor.

Kory Stamper is a lexicographer who has written dictionaries for nearly thirty years at Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionaries, and Dictionary.com. She is the author of "Word by Word." Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, New York, and The Washington Post. She travels around the country giving talks and presentations on things that only other word nerds would be interested in and she blogs regularly on language and lexicography at www.korystamper.com.

Clifford Robinson is the Public Humanities Specialist at the Princeton Public Library. Working closely with the library’s programming team and a humanities council, his effort on behalf of the library's public humanities initiative promotes critical thinking, civic engagement, and empathetic understanding through community collaboration and dynamic programs and resources. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University's Department of Classical Studies in 2014. Prior to joining the library staff, he was Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of Humanities at the University of the Sciences and a Visiting Scholar at Saint Joseph's University.  

This event is co-sponsored by the Princeton Public Library and Labyrinth Books.