Wm. Blake SG - Your Favorite Major?

Melvis said:

I paid a visit to one of my local used bookstores today and found "The Illuminated Blake" for $13.49. Unfortunately it's not in color, but there's a lot of work shown in it, which is cool. It is subtitled, "William Blake's Complete Illuminated Works with a Plate-by-Plate Commentary" and, although it is rather dry, the commentary is quite useful for deciphering the hard-to-see parts.

Click to expand...

Lucky find! That sounds like the Erdman/Dover book I saw on Amazon. Have you found any references to your favourite cards that you outlined in this thread, or comments in the book on them that you liked?

Or poems? <g>

Blake's Illuminations

Something interesting I found in my new book on Blake. Some of you might already know this but I didn't.

Blake acted as his own publisher since he was an engraver as well. He etched his words and pictures on a copper plate, printed it on fine paper and hand coloured EACH print. So when you see a refernce to an illuminated print, they cite the plate number and the copy (from A to Z)

This explains the curious comment I saw on an amazon review of my Norton book which said the colour reproductions were not very good. Some of them aren't, but it isn't the reproduction in this book that is faulty, it's just that Blake coloured them all slightly differently.

Apparently, Copy Z is one of the most beautiful copies he made, and this is in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection of the Library of Congress in the U.S.

So, turning to the colour plate depicting Urizen in my book (This is also the work Ed Buryn used on the IV Emperor card, my favourite card), I see that it is Plate i from Copy K of Europe: A Prophecy. I mentioned before that this is the frontispiece for that Blake book. It looks very washed out here, with mustardy golds and pinkish purply reds--certainly not the blaze of yellow, fire orange, and red that is seen on the card, or on the cover illustration of Northrop Frye's book "Fearful Symmetry."

I never did buy the reference Ed sells for the artwork in this deck, which I'm sure cites the copy he got his illustration from. The Frye book gives notes on the illustration, but doesn't specify which copy was used.

Another fascinating detail. I threw out the paper for ordering the art references that Ed sells--think it's a small booklet for $5 or something. It would be worth it to order for me at least, since I find this so fascinating.

Well, okay, I find everything fascinating.