Editor's Picks (opens in new tab)

This week, don’t miss a vibrant history of colors and their definitions, a visual study of artists and their dogs, and a fresh translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh By Jim Kelly This is an utterly delightful book about an unlikely topic: the quest to define different colors in dictionaries, especially before color plates were included. It is easy enough to describe a chair, but how do you explain azure? The book’s main character is I. H. Godlove, a scientist hired by Merriam-Webster in 1930 to...