I found Cornelis Drebbel the way you find the best characters: in a footnote in someone else’s story.

He turns up in Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red, which I’m reading this month, as the man behind the brilliant scarlet that made cochineal even more valuable than it already was. But the dye was only one piece of him. Drebbel was an inventor, an engraver, a chemist, a maker of improbable machines, and, apparently, a man spectacularly bad at converting genius into money.

I have been reading Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red, and it has already sent me off in several directions.

That is usually how I know a book is working on me. It does not stay inside its own covers. It starts attaching itself to other things I am looking at, writing about, or painting. From this one book, I found my way to Rembrandt, to cochineal, to Cornelis Drebbel, to military uniforms, to trade routes, to insects, to empire, to the astonishing fact that a color can carry half the world inside it.

That is the great subject of A Perfect Red: not red as an idea, or red as a symbol, but red as a material fact. A color made from tiny insects. A color people desired, guarded, stole, traded, imitated, taxed, wore, painted with, and fought over.

A color is never just a color.