On today's show, which originally aired late last year, we speak with Keith Recker, the co-author of an interesting and visually striking new book called "Pantone: The Twentieth Century in Color." Pantone, LLC, is known and referred to worldwide for its color systems, which are routinely used in digital and print publishing, fashion, plastics, architecture, interiors, paints, and so on. Indeed, Pantone's colors are seen as the universal language for accurate color communication --- and in this book, we're presented with the cultural history of 20th-century America in terms of these colors. Recker (along with his co-author, Leatrice Eiseman) offers roughly 200 different works of art, fashion, decor, and commercial production, which are each matched to one of eighty different Pantone color palettes in order to reveal the fads, phenomena, reversals, and resurgences of various hues. Social trends and national moods cross paths with color characteristics and chromatic patterns in the decade-by-decade volume that is "Pantone: The Twentieth Century in Color" --- a unique, large-format, and very fun-to-browse-through book, for certain.
"The Twentieth Century in Color" (Encore presentation.)
