Color book
A color book or stained book is certain in the course of foreign policy developments created government official dossier in a book whose cover color was adapted to the respective country. With the Blue books , the first color books were published in England in 1624. There, all parliamentary printed matter is still referred to as blue books . If these have a white envelope without any factual difference, they are called white papers .
The background to this name is the fact that in pre-industrial times the bleaching and smoothing of the paper was expensive and therefore z. B. the cheaper, unbleached paper was used for drafts. Since paper was made from waste fibers (e.g. from rags), in unbleached form it had the same color as the starting material, which was usually a grayish-greenish-bluish fiber pulp. Depending on the perception and meaning of the color words in a language, this resulted in a blue impression (e.g. in the German term “ blue letter ”) or a green impression (e.g. in the English term “ green paper ”).
The official publications on foreign policy and diplomacy in the German Foreign Office were always white (see also white paper ). The European Union also has various color books, the White Papers since 1985 and the Green Papers of the European Commission since 1984 .
Examples of color books from other countries are:
- White papers : German Empire (also gray books , for the first time in 1876 or 1884), Poland , Portugal , Scandinavian countries
- Red books: Austria , Spain , Soviet Union (from 1917), partly the USA . Leon Trotsky's son Leo Sedov wrote a “Red Book on the Moscow Trial” in 1936 in order to expose the forgeries of the Stalinist show trials.
- Yellow books: France , China
- Green Papers: Italy , Romania , Mexico
- Gray books: Denmark , Japan , Belgium
- Orange books: Netherlands , Russia (until 1917)
- Blue Books: Great Britain (see Blue Book (England) ), Kingdom of Serbia
- Blue and white books: Finland
In this tradition, color books by other groups or persons were later written:
- the black book as a public representation of grievances (e.g .: black book of communism ; black book capitalism ; black book of the Association of Taxpayers in Germany)
- the white paper
- the brown books about National Socialist perpetrators
- the green papers
- the blue book
- Practically applicable technical documentation and specifications are often referred to as red books (e.g. the IBM Redbooks )
- The various standards that describe the CD and its variants (e.g. audio CD, CD-ROM, rewritable CDs, etc.) are referred to as rainbow books .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Blue Books . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 3, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 7.
- ^ The colored or color books of the EU Article in the Wiener Zeitung of May 24, 2006