15 September 2002
The William Blake Archive <www.blakearchive.org> is pleased to announce
the publication of new electronic editions of three copies of _The
[First] Book of Urizen_. Copies A, C, and F were beautifully and
extensively color printed in the same printing session in 1794. This is
the first time that copies C and F have been reproduced, and the first
reproduction of copy A since 1929.
Copies A and C are in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale University,
and copy F is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. These three
copies join copy G, from the Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress,
and together comprise half the extant copies of _The [First] Book of
Urizen_. Two other copies of _Urizen_, copy D, from the 1794 printing
and copy B from the 1795 printing, are forthcoming.
Blake etched in shallow relief the twenty-eight plates of _The [First]
Book of Urizen_ in 1794, although only copies A and B contain them all.
In the same year, he printed proof copies H and I (only 3 and 2 plates
respectively) and copies A, C, D, E, F, and J. Copy B was printed the
following year as part of a set of large-paper copies of the illuminated
books and copy G was printed in 1818. Plate 4 appears only in copies A-C
(an impression was pulled for copy G but not included). The full-page
designs are differently positioned in each copy; copies A, B, E, and F
also have variant orders of text plates.
The electronic editions have newly edited SGML-encoded texts and new
images scanned and color-corrected from first-generation 4x5"
transparencies; text and images are fully searchable and supported by
the Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates.
With the Archive's recently added comparison feature, users can easily
juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies
of an illuminated book. New protocols for transcription, which produce
improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors' notes, have been
applied to all the _Urizen_ texts, including previously published copy
G.
With the publication of these three copies, the Archive now contains
fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 48 copies of 18 of
Blake's 19 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. They also join the Thomas Butts set of Blake's
watercolors illustrating the Book of Job, and Blake's twelve water-color
illustrations to John Milton's poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," the
first of several series of Milton illustrations that we will be adding
in Preview mode. In the near future we expect to release more drawings
and prints in Preview mode, which provides all the features of the
Archive except Image Search and Inote, a much-anticipated electronic
edition of _Jerusalem_ copy E, and further supplementary materials,
including a biography and glossary.
The editors of the Archive recently photographed 125 works by Blake in
the Department of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D. C., including biblical watercolors, pencil drawings, and
proofs in various states of the Job engravings. We have obtained
reproductions of the Blake collections of the Fogg Museum of Art,
Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne, and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Over the
next few years, we will be adding to the Archive these extensive
collections of books, prints, and drawings, many of which will be
reproduced in color for the first time.
As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access
restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made
possible through the continuing support of the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, by a major
grant from the Preservation and Access Division of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, by the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, and by 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.
You can access the William Blake Archive at http://www.blakearchive.org
and at our UK mirror at http://www.blakearchive.org.uk
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors Matthew G.
Kirschenbaum and Andrea Laue, technical editors The William Blake
Archive
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Victoria Szabo, Ph.D.
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Undergraduate Education
Academic Technology Specialist and Lecturer, Introduction to the Humanities
Stanford University
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650-723-9364; 650-723-7099 (fax)
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