Annotating Syme Nineteenth-Century Marks and Marginalia in Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814/1821)

In the spring and summer of 1814 one hundred copies of a new colour publication entered the marketplace: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, by Patrick Syme. Each copy contained a series of colour charts featuring the textual and material iterations of 108 different hues, matched to objects from the natural world. A second edition appeared in 1821, bringing the total copies of Syme’s colour manual to two hundred. Those that survive are the subject of this chapter, which investigates the object-histories of individual ‘book-copies’, by way of provenance information and the physical remnants of nineteenth-century consultation. These appear as marks and marginalia, signatures, dedications and bookplates, as well as material additions in the form of painted augmentations, fabric swatches and biological matter. The chapter uncovers a catalogue of interdisciplinary ownership, revealing the ways readers interacted with this rare and textural chromatic dictionary. In doing so it presents a material history of reading and using—as well as extra-illustrating, collaging and graffitiing—Syme’s book in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world, uncovering the diverse and diffuse applicability of an illustrated nomenclature of colours. Moving beyond purely epistemic considerations of Syme’s charts as a ‘system’ for chromatic identification, it considers the embodied and highly sensuous modes of chromatic enquiry facilitated by its material form.