Word: finlay
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...going to the creditors. If they are not here now, I'm sure they will be here in a minute." DBC Pierre, a.k.a. Peter Finlay, winner of the 2003 Booker Prize , on the fate of his $83,635 award...
...what really matters for Finlay are the stories behind a color: the thieves who conspired to steal the secret ingredients of an exquisite shade or the purple ooze of a rare sea snail or the red cochineal beetle that feeds off cactus. She traces why red ocher is sacred among Australian Aborigines, then jumps over to Renaissance Italy to muse on the unique blood-orange varnish that Stradivarius used to anoint his violins. Along the way, we learn that NapolEon could have died of arsenic poisoning from green wallpaper then in vogue. We are also taught that bureaucratic red tape...
...synthetic substitute for quinine, a cure for malaria. Perkin was at home, doing experiments infusing coal tar with hydrogen and oxygen?and had failed. Washing out his test tubes, he noticed a residue that resulted in a "strangely beautiful color"?mauve. Hidden inside a lump of coal tar, writes Finlay, was "the potential for thousands of colors." This is where most of our dyes come from...
...Today, we take our colors for granted. Why else would so many people dress in black? The delight of Finlay's prose is that it reawakens the dazzle of colors. It's timely, too; in this digital age, colors are in danger of disengaging from their symbolism. Toward the end of her journeys, Finlay visits the "Color King," Lawrence Herbert, whose New Jersey company, Pantone, has catalogued more than 15,000 shades of basic colors. But, as it turns out, Herbert is replacing his exquisite descriptions?"wood violet" and "sulphur spring" are two?with drab numbers. "Computers don't need...
...always liked "oxblood red," which I imagine as a deep, earthy red. Honestly, however, I'd be hard pressed to differentiate the color of an ox's blood from a dog's or a pigeon's (often used to describe the reddest of Burmese rubies). But then, Finlay's vivid writing colors my judgment. By bringing out the darker side to colors, she makes them all the brighter...