Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant color. In this rebus-style puzzle, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes. Try to guess the exact hue of each. Roll your mouse over the colored boxes to reveal the missing words. Click the colored boxes to learn more about each hue. Special thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research.
by Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.
—Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens.
Come back, my scarlet ladybird, / Back from far away; / I weary of my dolly wife, / My wife that cannot play.
She’s such a senseless wooden thing / She stares the livelong day; / Her wig of gold is stiff and cold / And cannot change to grey.
—Christina Rossetti, "I caught a little ladybird." From The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, edited by Tom Paulin, 1988.
Among musicians, Liszt is credited with a number of pet phrases: ‘More pink here, if you please.’ ‘That is too black.’ ‘I want it all azure.’ Beethoven is said to have called B minor the black key. Schubert likened E minor ‘unto a maiden robed in white with a rose– red bow on her breast.’ . . . ‘Debussy wrote: ’I realize that music is very delicate, and it takes, therefore, the soul at its softest fluttering to catch these violet rays of emotion.’
—Tom Douglas Jones, The Art of Light and Color, 1972.
If one says ‘Red’ (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.
Even when a certain color is specified which all listeners have seen innumerable times — such as the red of the Coca– Cola signs which is the same red all over country — they will still think of many different reds.
Even if all the listeners have hundreds of reds in front of them from which to choose the Coca– Cola red, they will again select quite different colors. And no one can be sure that he has found the precise red shade.
And even if that round red Coca– Cola sign with the white name in the middle is actually shown so that everyone focuses on the same red, each will receive the same projection on his retina, but no one can be sure whether each has the same perception.
—Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, 1963, from the revised and expanded edition, 2006.
About the Guest Author, Craig Conley
Website: http://www.OneLetterWords.com
Craig is an independent scholar and author of dozens of strange and unusual books, including a unicorn field guide and a dictionary of magic words. He also loves color: Prof. Oddfellow
