#based on the foreword and annotations I'm not convinced the editors of this edition know the answer to their own question frankly

[stjohnstarling]

I’ve just finished a reread of The King in Yellow. The edition I read had a bunch of classroom questions at the end and god these are stupid “what do YOU think yellow symbolizes?” Like what they want some poor kid to just guess? "Oh yellow reminds me of sunshine and piss :)" Well you can't trick me I know too many useless facts!

If you've spent as much time as I have reading obscene trash informative and educational literature, you know that in the Victorian era, pulp books were published with yellowish covers because the cheap paper of the time had a yellow tinge to it, so yellow caught on as a symbol of sensational literature in general. Yellow was the colour of the lurid, the immoral, the transgressive. It was associated with the Decadent movement (which most of the short stories in The King in Yellow are about) whose main periodical in England was called "The Yellow Book." There are a lot of strange and ambiguous things in The King in Yellow but this is not one of them. It's really frustrating for me to watch the Cthulhu-industrial complex pretend there's no context for this novel!