Rating: 
Summary: If you do professional watercolour work, buy this book.
Review: This book has revolutionized and reformed the world of watercolour painting. Major, respectable pigmenters have misinformed us in the labelling of their pigments. Now they are held to account. You need to know the information in this book. It will change your painting habits permanently. Wilcox is the Ralph Nader of the world of pigments.
Rating: 
Summary: No Longer Current
Review: This book was important in its day and has gone a long way to shame much of the industry into cleaning up its act, but it has not been updated or revised since its appearance over ten years ago and a lot has changed since then.To give one example: the German manufacturer Schminke responded to the book by firing its colormen and hiring a whole new team with scientific, as well as artistic backgrounds. Reading Wilcox's books is now a prerequisite to active employment there. The result is a much more reliable line of paints than what was offered at the time this book was written. On the other hand, some colors that did well in Wilcox's test have since been degraded by their manufacturers in order to cut costs. The book does bring home to the reader the importance of independent research but is not a reflection of the current market. Since Wilcox's "School of Color" has come out with its own line of high-quality paints, it is possible there will be no revision of this once vitally useful reference. Anyone interested in the School of Color paints can find the mailing address at the back of Wilcox's wonderful book "Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green."
Rating:
Summary: valuable resource
Review: This exhaustive (not to be confused with exhausting) research-based volume should be mandatory reading for all those artists interested in giving their customers their utmost quality of paint on works of art sold. So many paints are not light-fast, or are 'fugitive' (absolutely unreliable), or are packaged by the manufacturer as 'new' colors when they are, in fact, only creative blends of basic colors that any artist can create with colors they likely already have. This book, covering many of the watercolor paint producers in the Western world, exposes these flawed paints, but also gives credit where due to the top-notch pigments and their manufacturers. Details of content, health ratings, color-fastness and quality of brush use are easily understood. Fantastic color swatches (before and after exposure to light) are beside each manufacturer's sample. My only complaint is that this is the only edition available (pub. 1991), as the author said it would be updated periodically, which does not yet appear to have happened. There were only a couple of Quinacridone colors 12 years ago at the time of publication, whereas there are many more now.
Rating:
Summary: out-of-date tirade
Review: wilcox did artists a tremendous service when he first published this book: his emphasis on lightfast paints (that don't fade when exposed to light), his strong endorsement of the quinacridone pigments, and his tireless research -- this woke up the art materials industry and is responsible for the high quality of today's watercolor paints. but the book has aged badly: almost all the information is out of date (daniel smith and m. graham paints are not listed, current paint lines are completely changed from what is shown in the book, etc.). and then there are the endless tirades against alizarin crimson and the chartjunky outlines of paint tubes -- this gets tedious very quickly. if you need a paint products guide, get instead the hilary page guide to watercolor paints, which is current, informative, and friendly to use.
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