ROY G. BIV is a reference and inspiration for designers and artists, as well as a unique, beautiful, and irresistible book for just about anyone.

Color is all around us every day. We use it to interpret the world—red means stop, blue means water, orange means construction. But it is also written into our metaphors, of speech and thought alike: yellow means cowardice; green means envy—unless you’re in Germany, where yellow means envy, and you can be “beat up green and yellow.”

Jude Stewart, a design expert and writer, digs into this rich subject with gusto. What color is the universe? We might say it’s black, but astrophysicists think it might be turquoise. Unless it’s beige. To read about color from Jude Stewart is to unlock a whole different way of looking at the world around us—and bringing it all vividly to life.

The book itself is organized around the rainbow and is lavishly designed, with cross-references that liven up each page. (Follow the thread of imperialism, for example, from the pink-colored colonies on maps of the British Empire to the green wallpaper that might have killed Napoleon.) A lovingly packaged, distinctive book, it will be the only one of its kind.