12 June 2008

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic editions of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copies K, L, and M. The Archive is also publishing the collection list for the Victoria University Library in Toronto and Alexander Gourlay's revised Glossary of Terms, Names, and Concepts in Blake.

Blake etched twenty-seven plates for Marriage in relief in 1790. Copy K is an early printing of plates 21-24, and copies L and M are early printings of plates 25-27, "A Song of Liberty." Copy K is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, copy L is in the Essick Collection, and copy M, formerly in the Bentley Collection, is in the Victoria University Library. Only nine complete copies of the Marriage are known to exist; copies K, L, and M, apparently printed as autonomous pamphlets, join six complete copies previously published in the Archive (and now republished with corrected transcriptions).

The four plates of copy K were printed in black ink on both sides of a single sheet of wove paper, folded down the middle after printing to form two leaves. Plate 21 is in its first state and the vignette on plate 24 is missing, probably masked during printing but possibly not yet executed. In copies L and M, plate 25 is in its first state, and thus these copies were also printed very early in the production process; in copy M, the eight lines of the "Chorus" on plate 27 were masked during printing. The plates were printed on single sheets folded down the middle to form pamphlets of two leaves. Copy L was printed in brownish-black on laid paper and copy M was printed in grayish-black on wove paper.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Marriage copies K, L, and M 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 all copies of Marriage in the Archive.

With the publication of Marriage copies K, L, and M, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of sixty-five 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 manuscripts and 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 water color illustrations to John Milton's Paradise Regained, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, as well as the Butts and Thomas sets of illustrations to Milton's Comus, Nativity ode, and Paradise Lost.

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