11 October 2006

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of The [First] Book of Urizen copy D (British Museum).

Blake etched in shallow relief the 28 plates of The [First] Book of Urizen in 1794, although only copies A and B contain them all. Copy D, with 26 plates, was beautifully and extensively color printed in 1794, along with copies A, C, E, F, and J. Copy D is the sixth of eight extant copies to enter the Archive, joining copies A, B (1795), C, F, and G (1818). Like these and all the illuminated books in the Archive, its text and images are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications. With the Archive's Compare feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of this or any of the other illuminated book. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors' notes, have been applied to copy D and to all the Urizen texts previously published.

With the publication of Urizen copy D, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 55 copies 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. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important series of engravings, sketches, and watercolor drawings, including Illustrations to Thomas Gray's Poems, Water Color and Engraved Illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, The Large Color Printed Drawings of 1795 and c. 1805, and the recently published Linnell set of Book of Job water colors and the Sketchbook Containing Drawings for the Engraved Illustrations to the Book of Job.

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 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
William Shaw, project manager
The William Blake Archive