I guess the whole Daymon Smith thing is 'taking both pills': the Red Book of Westmarch and the blue Book of Mormon.
The Book of Mormon, for those who may not be aware, is blue. I'm not entirely sure when or why it made the transition from being a "Gold Bible" to being blue -- but the latter color is by now an inescapable part of its brand. Here, for example, is what the CJCLDS's online scripture site looks like:
None of the other volumes of scripture is any particular color, but the Book of Mormon just has to be blue.
The idea of a blue book and a red book got me thinking about the Scarlet Notebook -- a collection of Tychonievich family juvenilia, so called because those writings were originally kept in a three-ring binder of that color. (The collection outgrew that binder a very long time ago and has been housed in a much larger white one for decades, but it's still never called anything other than the Scarlet Notebook.)
This in turn made me wonder whether there was anything out there called the Scarlet Book. Could be, right? There's Jung's Red Book, Wittgenstein's Blue Book and Brown Book -- maybe some notable thinker had a Scarlet Book. When I googled scarlet book, though, most of the results were for a book with the title Scarlet -- a young-adult sci-fi novel by Marissa Meyer, based on "Little Red Riding Hood." Okay, so much for that idea.
In the afternoon, I popped into a used bookstore and found this:
It's a book called Scarlett -- with two t's, so it didn't show up in my search -- shelved right next to one called Sacré Bleu ("holy blue," an archaic French exclamation). The blue Book of Mormon is classified as un texte sacré, and the author of Sacré Bleu even has a name that sounds like the first syllable of Mormon.
The etymology of the word scarlet is highly uncertain, but one theory is that it ultimately derives from the Latin sigillatus, which means "sealed." A Scarlet Book is a sealed book.
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