Nicholas Rougeux
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
A Website by Nicholas RougeuxA recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.
Title Cities
An Artwork by Nicholas RougeuxA book’s title page contains more than its namesake—including its author, contributors, publisher, and release date, and. Antiquarian books are known for having lengthy titles, especially those of a scientific nature. These books’ frequently unassuming title pages are gateways to a wealth of knowledge and the focal point of this project.
Title pages of antique influential scientific books covering a variety of subjects were coded and reimagined as colorful cityscapes based solely on their words to illustrate the unique body of knowledge readers would find within.
Boxes were drawn around each word of a title page and color-coded by its first letter (words beginning with “A” are one color, “B” another, and so on). Each title page has its own palette. Those boxes were then upended and arranged to form an abstract cityscape while maintaining their original sizes relative to each other.
British & Exotic Mineralogy
A Website by Nicholas Rougeux
The Evolution and Fate of Botanical Field Books
To serve as a reminder
Looking back at my notebooks now, the information seems fairly sketchy, often abbreviated, and fairly uninformative. The purpose was merely to serve as a reminder for when, that evening, I would write up my notes in a proper field book.
Sterile creatures
Now that we are in the era of personal computers, traditional field books are being replaced by computer files. By default such “field books” are sterile creatures—all the words are spelled properly, the location data are exact to a matter of a few feet, and everything is properly formatted. In the spring of 1998, I penciled my last entry into my signature field book with the bright orange cover. Thereafter I have maintained a computer-based field book.
Oh, all the right stuff is there, clear, crisp and, well, dull… I tend to be overly particular about it—the format has to be right, everything properly spelled, the descriptive sequence in the proper order, and even the observations drafted with the final publication in mind (rather than what I happen to see at the moment). The emotions of finding something new, once mentioned in my handwritten field books, are now missing, as if my mental editor says “no, that is not proper for a scientific journal.”
Further and further away
In looking over my own forty-five years of keeping a record of plant specimens, I find that I am personally moving further and further away from the words I generate, becoming more aloof and separate from the experience of the actual event of collecting, concentrating instead on the precision of where and when. It is merely record keeping for the sole purpose of giving the facts.
With the decline of letter writing and the sterilization of field books, what we are losing is the individual. Field books are like letters that are replaced by often ephemeral emails. I fear that as we move further into the computer age we will similarly lose the detailed historical record that field books once provided. Sadly, the personalities of botanists will also be lost, for such musings as might be found in a field book are often telling to those wishing to know more of the past.