23 April 1998
The editors of the William Blake Archive are pleased to announce the publication of seven new electronic editions of Blake's illuminated books. They are:
We had announced Urizen copy G as forthcoming two months ago, but formatting the double-columned text diplomatically in SGML for both Netscape and Internet Explorer proved more taxing and time consuming than anticipated. Such are the joys and tribulations of electronic publishing. Solving the problems there, though, ensured diplomatic transcriptions for Blake's other books with double-columned texts, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los. Together, these three works are often referred to as Blake's Bible of Hell or, simply, the Urizen books. Urizen, of which there are only seven extant copies, was first produced in 1794, color printed to form copies A, C, D, E (untraced), F, and J. It was printed again in 1795 to form copy B, which was produced as part of a set of illuminated books printed on large paper, and then one last time in c. 1818 to form copy G, which was produced in Blake's late printing and coloring style. The editors are currently working on copies A, B, C, and F and expect to have them in the Archive by the end of the year. The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los exist in unique copies, with only a few proof impressions extant. They were printed in 1795 and executed in intaglio instead of in relief etching, the technique Blake normally used for his illuminated books. Although their texts are printed in intaglio, their frontispieces are beautifully color printed from the surface of the plates.
With The Song of Los, which consists of two parts entitled "Africa" and "Asia," we complete Blake's other series of illuminated books, sometimes known as the Continental Prophecies, begun in 1793 with America and continued in 1794 with Europe. The copy of The Song of Los included here is one of six extant; all were color printed in the same printing session in 1795.
With fourteen complete copies extant, America is not as rare as these other illuminated books, but copy A, which was printed and colored in 1795 as part of Blake's large-paper set of books, is, along with copies K, O, and M, one of only four colored copies-- and it was the model for copy K. Moreover, only it and copy O have the last four lines on plate 4, which was masked in the printing of the other copies. The Archive will include copies M and O (c. 1807 and 1818) later this year.
Only nine copies of Europe are extant, and only two of those, copies H and O (1795 and 1818), have plate 3, the Preludium. The Archive will include both of these copies by the end of the year. Copy E, included here, was lightly color printed on both sides of the paper in 1794 and joins copy B, color printed more heavily on one side of the paper the same year.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy F is an exquisitely beautiful copy, heavily color printed (especially its frontispiece) in c. 1794, and never before reproduced. It joins copies C and J (both 1793), and will be joined later this year by copies G and P (1795 and 1818).
All of these editions have newly edited texts; all images in the editions were scanned from either 4x5 or 8x10 transparencies, nearly all of which were made specifically for the Archive. Like our other editions, these are all SGML-encoded, fully searchable for both text and images and supported by the unique Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates.
The Archive now contains sixteen copies of ten illuminated books. In the coming months, we will be adding copies of All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, For the Sexes, Milton, and Jerusalem, along with copies of books already in the Archive but from different printings. Our goal is to have the entire illuminated canon online this year. In addition, work continues on the SGML edition of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, which we anticipate releasing sometime this spring.
Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, Joseph Viscomi
Blake
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