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There are some books that feel as though they were designed, not simply written, and The Secret Lives of Colour is unmistakably one of them. Kassia St Clair's debut sets out to tell the stories of seventy-five shades, dyes and pigments, and from the moment you pick it up - the tactile trompe l'oeil cover, the narrow stripe of colour running along the edge of every page so the closed book becomes its own rainbow - you sense a writer who understands that a book about colour had better earn its visual keep. Happily, it does.

St Clair organises her material by broad colour families - white, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, green, brown, black and grey - devoting two or three pages to each hue. The format is the book's defining choice, and it is what makes it so easy to pick up for five minutes and put down an hour later, slightly dazed, having learned that lead white quietly poisoned generations of painters and white-faced beauties, that Mountbatten pink was briefly an official British naval camouflage, and that the ancient Greeks had no word for blue. A brief prelude on chromophilia, chromophobia and the science of vision grounds what follows, though readers hoping for a serious treatment of colour theory or perception should be warned: the science is glancing rather than thorough.

The prose is warm, witty and often slyly elegant. St Clair clearly loves the obscure corners of the English language, and the occasional reach for a word like "Brobdingnagian" sits comfortably alongside the book's lighter touches of humour. Her training as a cultural historian shows in the confident way she moves between chemistry, fashion, art, politics, religion and trade, and the bibliography at the back is generous enough to satisfy anyone who wants to dig deeper into a particular shade. The research feels genuine without ever turning academic.

Not everything lands. The vignette format that makes the book so approachable is also its central limitation: with two or three pages per colour, some entries feel like appetisers for a meal that never arrives, and the overall experience can read as somewhat fragmented. Anyone looking for a unifying argument about how colour is categorised, perceived or culturally produced will notice the absence. This is a book of anecdotes rather than a thesis, and its pleasures are correspondingly episodic.

None of which much diminishes the achievement. The Secret Lives of Colour is exactly the object it wants to be: a beautifully produced, lightly worn compendium that rewards both the casual browser and the committed colour obsessive. It sits happily on a coffee table, survives a long train journey, and leaves you slightly better furnished to notice the world. If you have ever wondered why puce is called puce, why Scheele's green killed its wearers, or why Picasso spent a period in blue, this is the book that will tell you - and make you want to look up half a dozen more things besides.