In 1692, a random Dutch man published a 700-page book describing every color conceivable, and it's largely gone unnoticed.

With over 2,100 colors, the Pantone Color Guide is modern society's bible regarding everything with a hue, a selection so dense yet lovingly adored by artists, designers, and marketers as to what's what with color.

Yet 322 years earlier, a somewhat anonymous Dutch man known solely by 'A. Boogert' published an over 700-page book detailing the breadth of known colors on a level that Pantone needed centuries to match with only half the beauty.

A medieval book historian at Leiden University, Erik Kwakkel, stumbled upon the largely unknown work by A. Boogert while combing over a French database. Kwakkel describes on his blog how, until recently, no scholarly research has ever touched on the 17-century book--and that the only known work to mention Boogert is forthcoming from a yet to be published Ph.D. study from the University of Amsterdam.

Until anything else is known about him, for now Boogert goes down as the medieval Pantone.

Or, rather, Pantone is the poor man's Boogert.