17 July 1998
The editors of the William Blake Archive are pleased to announce the publication of six new electronic editions of Blake's illuminated books. They are:
Composed and executed in 1788, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion are Blake's first works in illuminated printing, though no copy of either work survives from this date. The ten plates of All Religions were followed quickly by twenty No Natural Religion plates in two antithetical sets (a and b series). Only one copy of All Religions is extant, now in the Huntington Library, printed c. 1795 with and in the same style as There is No Natural Religion copy L, the only copy consisting exclusively of the ten b-series of plates, now in The Pierpont Morgan Library. The other twelve recorded copies of this book consist of a mixture of the same eight to twelve plates, which appeared to be merely incomplete sets of proofs until it was discovered that six of these copies were 19th-century reproductions. Once the inauthentic impressions were weeded out, it became apparent that what remained was Blake's selection of a and b plates for an abridged version of the work printed around 1794. We present copies B, C, and G of this twelve-plate work, now in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art, Library of Congress, and The Pierpont Morgan Library, respectively.
There are only four copies of Milton, Blake's most personal epic. Copy C, from the New York Public Library, was Blake's own copy. Printed c. 1811, it was later reconfigured and renumbered by Blake when he inserted extra plates, which he appears to have done on at least two different occasions.
All of these editions have newly edited texts and are all fully searchable for both text and images and supported by the unique Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates.
We now have twenty-two copies of thirteen illuminated books. Over this and next year, we will be adding Blake's last illuminated works, On Homers Poetry [&] On Virgil, The Ghost of Abel, and Laocoon, as well as Milton copy D and Jerusalem copy E. We will also be adding at least six more copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, two copies of Songs of Innocence, five copies of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, four copies of The Book of Urizen, and two copies each of America, a Prophecy and Europe, a Prophecy. In addition, work continues on the SGML edition of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
We will continue to post updates on various lists every few months, but readers interested in the progress of the Archive can subscribe to our Blake Update list, which can be found on the Archive's Contents Page. On this page readers will also find that we have opened the top level of the Contributing Institutions Page, which provides contact information and links to institutions participating in the Archive. In the coming months, we plan to include color-coded and linked lists of each institution's entire Blake collection to indicate what is and is not in the Archive and what is forthcoming.
Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, Joseph Viscomi
Blake
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