Oddness and lavish mid-Victorian colour printing did seem to go together, yes: https://books.google.ie/books?id=SugpRWf_FB4C&pg=PA35&lpg=PA... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiarium_Scoticum . Like the frilly initial letters it's clearly an archaising choice meant to hark back to early printed Euclids (see the one in https://www.c82.net/euclid/about/ ): part of the nineteenth-century craze for style revivals.