What Color Is Love? was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1966. The book represents Anglund’s most explicitly social statement: by asking “what color is love?” and answering with images of children of different races sharing, playing, and caring for one another, she makes an argument for racial equality through the language of emotion rather than politics.
Published in 1966 — between the Voting Rights Act and the long hot summers of urban unrest — the book occupied a particular cultural position. It was neither a protest book nor a book that ignored the reality of racial division. Instead, it proceeded from the premise that love transcends racial categories, showing Black and white children together without comment or explanation, as if their togetherness were the most natural thing in the world.
For Anglund’s largely white, middle-class audience, this was a gentle challenge: the book did not demand confrontation with systemic racism, but it did normalize interracial friendship and affection at a moment when many white American families were still resisting integration. Its very presence in a nursery or on a coffee table was a small statement of values.
Anglund’s characteristic style — the nearly featureless faces, the soft colors, the universal quality of her figures — was well suited to this subject. By minimizing individual facial features, she had always suggested that her children could be anyone; in What Color Is Love?, she made that universality explicit by varying skin tones while maintaining the same essential style.
Collecting What Color Is Love?
First edition (Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1966): Small hardcover, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good/very good: $10–$25