My research project, part of a larger dissertation on the early modern literary culture of mourning and commemoration, directs attention to the emergence of new symbolic functions of black color in the early modern print culture of loss. At the turn of the seventeenth-century, newly encoded ritual links between death and the display of black cloth translate into a set of print conventions used to mark and distinguish memorial texts as a specific, distinct category of writing. The unusual technology of “negative” woodblock printing employed to represent these symbolic effects offers insights into early modern conceptualizations of the experience of loss—as disruption, as inversion, or as aporia. At the same time, these print innovations register a larger nexus of historical shifts in the material production and cultural perception of black color with broad implications not only for mourning ritual but also across discourses of race and religion.