The Library Company’s first shareholders were working men of limited means, and they wanted books that combined utility with value for their money. Many of the books they ordered from London were illustrated with copper plate engravings, but none of them were in color. Color was an expensive luxury. Usually it took the form of watercolor added by hand to the printed plates, one at a time. It was not until 1763, more than thirty years after its founding, that the Library Company purchased its first book with color plates.
In Living Color surveys the growth of the Library Company’s collection of color-plate books, with a glance at the collectors and librarians who acquired them, from the mid-18th century up to the present. Because the collection is so strong, it is also a sampling of some of the finest color-plate books produced in Britain and America from the 1760s to the 1890s. Once, the country’s appetite for color images seemed insatiable. Today our eyes are jaded, and yet the impact of the best of these color-plate books remains as strong as ever. No reproduction can convey it; they must be seen in the original.
Curated by James N. Green, 2007.
Resources
Living Color: Collecting Color Plate Books at The Library Company of Philadelphia
