300 Years Before Color - The New Edition

For this exclusive edition of just 1,692 copies, we have carefully cleaned and restored the background of the original facsimile, enabling Boogert’s hand-painted colours to shine more brightly than ever before. The edition is printed on fine Italian paper by Fedrigoni, chosen to give the colours an exceptional richness and brilliance.

Presented in a traditional Italian Panettone tin and accompanied by an exclusive collector's playing card deck and a full-size poster suitable for framing, this special edition celebrates one of the most remarkable color manuscripts ever created. More than three centuries after it was created, Boogert’s extraordinary colour manuscript continues to fascinate graphic designers, artists, collectors and lovers of colour around the world.

In 1960, Lawrence Herbert was working at a colour printing company primarily focused on the cosmetics industry. A gifted businessman and visionary, he chose to acquire the assets of a company that was then $50,000 in debt.

Two years later, in 1962, Herbert founded Pantone, developing a new formula based on ten pigments to achieve greater consistency and more uniform colour results. The result was a guide of 500 colours that quickly became indispensable to companies in the graphic arts, textile and industrial sectors. One well-known example of its usefulness was Kodak, which in the 1950s had begun to suffer losses because the yellow printed on its film packaging was not always consistent. Variations in tone led customers to believe the film was not genuine or had expired, affecting sales significantly.

Over time, these now-iconic colour guides became indispensable in the world of design, while also inspiring the wider creative universe through increasingly imaginative and unexpected interpretations.

But more than 300 years before Pantone, Dutch artist A. Boogert created what may be regarded as one of history’s earliest colour guides. In 1692, he produced a remarkable manuscript in which colours and their tonal scales were carefully explored in watercolour, revealing their nuances through countless combinations and mixtures. The result was an extraordinary work of more than 900 pages, written and painted entirely by hand. Today, only one copy of this remarkable volume survives, preserved at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France. This is because, in 1692, printing technology was not yet advanced enough to reproduce such a work with any reliability. It would take another century before lithography made the faithful reproduction of a treatise of this kind truly possible.