March 2003

The William Blake Archive www.blakearchive.org is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion copy E. Jerusalem is Blake's masterpiece in illuminated printing, and this copy is his greatest achievement in the medium. Consisting of 100 relief and white-line etchings divided into four chapters, Jerusalem is his longest illuminated book, and its plates are among his largest, approximately 22.5 x 16 cm. Though dated 1804 on its title plate, it was not printed in its entirety until c. 1820. Five complete copies are extant, along with one incomplete colored copy (chapter 1 only) and three complete posthumous copies.

Copy E, the only complete colored copy, is magnificent. All but one plate (51, in black ink) were printed in red-orange on one side of large sheets of J. Whatman 1820 paper, elaborately finished in watercolors, pen and ink, and gold. Each impression is numbered in pen and ink in the top right corner; the first two pages have decorative borders and all the others have one thin line drawn in red-orange ink around the image, setting off each page like a miniature painting. Blake is reputed to have worked on this colored copy well into his final years, though he never found a buyer.

Copy E, from the Paul Mellon Collection of the Yale Center for British Art, joins other copies in the Archive printed and colored in this late style: America a Prophecy copy O, Europe a Prophecy copy K, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copies G and I, Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy P, The Book of Thel copy O, The Book of Urizen copy G, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies Z and AA. Jerusalem copy E will eventually be joined by copy A, whose plates in part 1 are arranged differently, and by copy I, a posthumous copy, presumably printed by Frederick Tatham, who inherited all of Blake's plates and art works, including Jerusalem copy E, after Blake's wife Catherine died.

As recipients of our Archive Updates are well aware, we have been working on Jerusalem copy E for several years. The challenges presented by its scope and difficulty made it an attractive laboratory, in effect, for experiments in editorial method. Many of the adjustments in protocols and processes that arose as solutions to the problems of creating an electronic edition of Jerusalem have already been introduced into other works we have published in the meantime. These include significant alterations in transcription, display, editorial notation, even in line numbering. We also took the opportunity to rescan all of our first generation 4 x 5 inch color transparencies at higher resolution on better equipment, producing digital images of exceptional fidelity and beauty that capture even the texture of the paper. This rescanning and color-correcting process took over two years.

The Archive now contains at least one copy of each of Blake's 19 illuminated books, and in most cases includes copies from each of the printings of the books, for a current total of 49 copies, all fully searchable. In addition to the books, the Archive includes the engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job, generally considered Blake's masterpiece in traditional line engraving and the culmination of his long pictorial engagement with the Book of Job. His first series of 19 watercolors illustrating Job (commissioned c. 1805-06 by his chief patron, Thomas Butts) are available in the Archive in Preview, our mode of presentation that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (our image annotation program). Also in Preview are Blake's illustrations to Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." Also forthcoming this year are Blake's engraved designs for Robert Blair's The Grave, Edward Young's Night Thoughts, and the Job pencil sketches, along with an illustrated Blake biography and glossary and never-before-reproduced copies of illuminated books.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible through the continuing support of the Library of Congress, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, by a major grant from the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and by the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Andrea Laue, technical editors
The William Blake Archive

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