2 June 1999

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of new electronic editions for two works in Blake's emblem series: For Children: The Gates of Paradise and the revised and augmented version For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise. Through a numbered series of intaglio plates with inscriptions ranging from single words to brief aphorisms, Blake puts the course of human life from birth to death in psychological perspective. Some of the emblems form narrative sequences; others exemplify mental states and their reification in the external world. Blake etched in intaglio the eighteen plates of For Children in 1793 and printed all extant copies (A-E) in the same year. The copy published in the Archive is copy D, from the Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

In about 1820, Blake revised For Children: The Gates of Paradise, giving the work a new title, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, reworking the design plates at least twice, and adding three new text plates at the end (19-21). Plates 19-20 contain brief interpretive statements keyed by number to the preceding design plates. The final plate is addressed to Satan as the "God of This [fallen] World." Copies A and B were probably printed c. 1820. Copies C and D, plus a large group of impressions never collated into complete copies by Blake but now divided into what are designated as copies J-N, date from c. 1825. Copies E-I are probably posthumous. We now publish copy D, from the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Both electronic editions have newly edited SGML-encoded texts and new images scanned and color-corrected from first-generation 4x5" transparencies; they are each fully searchable for both text and images and supported by the Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates.

With the publication of these two titles, the Archive now contains 33 copies of 18 separate books, including at least one copy of every one of Blake's works in illuminated printing except the 100 plates of Jerusalem (forthcoming).

Also, we are pleased to announce that a Tour of the Archive is now available online. Through a sequence of several dozen graphical screenshots linked to narrative commentary, the Tour introduces users to the basic organization and structure of the Archive, the features of its interface, its search options, and the function of the Inote and ImageSizer applications. The Tour is located in the "About the Archive" wing of the site. Available as the first link off our main table of contents page at the URL above, the "About the Archive" materials include, in addition to the Tour, a statement of Editorial Principles and Methodology, a Frequently Asked Questions list, a Technical Summary, and an updated version of the article-length Plan of the Archive detailing our intentions with regard to Blake's non-illuminated works--and more. We hope that the Tour, together with these other materials, will prove valuable both to our own growing user community and to scholars interested in the theory and practice of electronic editing more generally.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi, Editors
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Technical Editor
The William Blake Archive

Blake Archive Homepage