Single cardstock sheet of prefatory text, printed to both sides, followed by 24 color palette plates meant to serve as aids for composing color harmonies. Octavo (6 7/8 x 4 7/8 inches). Loose as issued in printed publisher's heavy paper portfolio cover, accompanied by cloth slipcase. Some light wear to slipcase, extremely minor soiling to portfolio cover, interior contents with some minor consistent toning, light wear along tabbed edges, overall excellent. Aue in Sachsen, Germany: Baumann, circa 1929.

Paul Baumann (1869-1961) co-founded the Baumann & Prase company in 1912 with painter and color theorist Otto Prase (1874-1956). Baumann had previously manufactured color cards and charts for industrial purposes, while Prase had developed an award-winning theory for color mixing, for which he won numerous medals at trade fairs throughout the first decades of the 20th century.

In 1912, the two published 'Baumanns Neue Farbentonkarte, System Prase', a color chart based on Prase's color system, which featured the three primary colors with intensity of hue expressed on a scale of 0 to 9. The initial chart featured 24 main hues and a 14-step gray scale, while later charts used 48 main hues.

The preface to this color atlas lays out the nomenclature system employed here: each pure color is identified by a single letter - R for red, P for purple, O for orange, etc. Two or three-letter combinations are used to identify hues along the color wheel. Rp signifies a red leaning towards purple, Pr a purple leaning towards red, and RP a color exactly in the middle between red and purple, etc. Bg indicates blue deviating from green, while Bgg means a greenish-blue, and Gbb a bluish-green.

These letters and letter combinations are used at the head of each of the 24 color chart plates in this volume, deployed in such a way that at the end of the 24 plates, we have made a complete circle around the color wheel. We start at C (citron, or yellow), move to Co, then CO, then Oc, and O, etc, ending up at Cg before we would come back to C. The charts each contain eight rows of color made from strips of colored paper which are then sandwiched between sheets of thin white cardboard and hole-punched. Each color is also numbered, with shades ranging from 1 through 680. The bottom row on each chart is a gray scale ranging from white (1) to black (8), with the "titular" color of that chart located at the top of the pyramid. Other hues are shown descending the pyramid as one adds in white, black, or grays.

A very scarce work of 1920's German color theory; as of March 2026, OCLC locates only a single holding of this work in a North American library, and one copy of a similar work subtitled "Atlas II für die Philatelie" from the 1940s.

Book ID: 53649

Price: $1,850.00