800-page Book of Colors nearly 3 centuries before.

In 1963, Lawrence Herbert published the Pantone Color Guide, a comprehensive system of identifying and matching colors. But 271 years before that in 1672, a Dutch artist compiled Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l'eau, a nearly 800-page book that did pretty much the same thing. One got a bigger audience than the other; we'll let you guess which.

The timing of the book makes sense—the 17th century was known as the Golden Age of Dutch Art, and as many as 10 million works were created during that time. Despite the book's aim as an educational guide, there was only a single copy made, so scholars guess that only a handful of people were ever able to read it. But today, we have a little thing called the internet. That means that nearly three centuries after writing it, "A. Boogert" is getting his or her just desserts: thousands of people can now admire the hard work that went into making this book a reality. The source of the original digital images seems to have vanished from the web, but you can still admire some of the author's handiwork here.