13 September 2002

The William Blake Archive www.blakearchive.org is pleased to announce the publication of new electronic editions of three copies of The [First] Book of Urizen. Copies A, C, and F were beautifully and extensively color printed in the same printing session in 1794. This is the first time that copies C and F have been reproduced, and the first reproduction of copy A since 1929.

Copies A and C are in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, and copy F is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. These three copies join copy G, from the Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, and together comprise half the extant copies of The [First] Book of Urizen. Two other copies of Urizen, copy D, from the 1794 printing and copy B from the 1795 printing, are forthcoming.

Blake etched in shallow relief the twenty-eight plates of The [First] Book of Urizen in 1794, although only copies A and B contain them all. In the same year, he printed proof copies H and I (only 3 and 2 plates respectively) and copies A, C, D, E, F, and J. Copy B was printed the following year as part of a set of large-paper copies of the illuminated books and copy G was printed in 1818. Plate 4 appears only in copies A-C (an impression was pulled for copy G but not included). The full-page designs are differently positioned in each copy; copies A, B, E, and F also have variant orders of text plates.

The electronic editions have newly edited SGML-encoded texts and new images scanned and color-corrected from first-generation 4x5" transparencies; text and images are fully searchable and supported by the Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates. With the Archive's recently added comparison feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of an illuminated book. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors' notes, have been applied to all the Urizen texts, including previously published copy G.

With the publication of these three copies, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 48 copies of 18 of Blake's 19 illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. They also join the Thomas Butts set of Blake's watercolors illustrating the Book of Job, and Blake's twelve water-color illustrations to John Milton's poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," the first of several series of Milton illustrations that we will be adding in Preview mode. In the near future we expect to release more drawings and prints in Preview mode, which provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote, a much-anticipated electronic edition of Jerusalem copy E, and further supplementary materials, including a biography and glossary.

The editors of the Archive recently photographed 125 works by Blake in the Department of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C., including biblical watercolors, pencil drawings, and proofs in various states of the Job engravings. We have obtained reproductions of the Blake collections of the Fogg Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Over the next few years, we will be adding to the Archive these extensive collections of books, prints, and drawings, many of which will be reproduced in color for the first time.

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 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.

You can access the William Blake Archive at http://www.blakearchive.org and at our UK mirror at http://www.blakearchive.org.uk

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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