14 December 2007

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of America a Prophecy copy F. One of fourteen extant copies, copy F was printed in 1793, the date on its title plate, with at least nine other copies. Now in the British Museum, it joins four other copies in the Archive, copies E (1793), A (1795), M (c. 1807), and O (1821), which taken together represent the full printing history of this illuminated book. The eighteen plates of copy F, like those of copy E but unlike those of the later copies, were printed on both sides of the leaves, except for the frontispiece and title page (plates 1 and 2). The book was left uncolored, though the title plate has gray washes. The plates were printed in a greenish-black ink; five lines at the end of the text on plate 4 were masked and did not print, and plate 13 is in its first state.

America a Prophecy was the first of Blake's "Continental Prophecies," followed by Europe a Prophecy in 1794, executed in the same style and size but usually colored, and, in 1795, "Africa" and "Asia," two sections making up The Song of Los. Fine and important examples of all three works are in the Archive.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of America copy F 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 books. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors' notes, have been applied to copy F and to all the America texts previously published.

With the publication of America copy F, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of sixty-one copies of Blake's nineteen 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 water color drawings, including Blake's 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, the Linnell and Butts sets of the Book of Job water colors and the sketchbook containing drawings for the engraved illustrations to the Book of Job, the water color illustrations to Robert Blair's The Grave, and the recently published illustrations to John Milton's Comus, both the Thomas and Butts sets.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and 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
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive