This beautifully illustrated book provides an overview of numerous key works from the history of color and presents them in their historical and aesthetic context. Color is fundamental to our experience and understanding of the world. It spans continents and cultures, disciplines and decades. It is used to convey information and knowledge, evoke moods, and stir emotions.

The "Library of Colors" tells the story of our understanding of color from antiquity to the present. From Aristotle to Isaac Newton to Wassily Kandinsky, the magic of colors has fascinated, astonished, and sometimes perplexed great minds from philosophy, science, and art. Throughout the centuries, there have been various motivations for such studies of color. The philosophy of ancient Greece sought to make sense of the world and explain our experience within it. The botany of the Enlightenment aimed to represent nature in all its splendor. The fin-de-siècle occultism believed that the color spectrum offered a glimpse into the supernatural.

Interspersed within the historical overview are thematic essays that demonstrate how color has been used across a variety of disciplines and fields: in faith, commerce, language, natural history, nutrition, health, printing, and music. The illustrations are primarily sourced from the renowned Colour Reference Library at the Royal College of Art in London. Its collection spans six centuries and includes nearly 2,000 titles, from a Gothic manuscript on the composition of the rainbow to hand-colored works of the Enlightenment on color theory, to vibrant color plates from the 20th century.