Product Description

The nature of William Blake's genius is most completely expressed in his Illuminated Books. As poet/artist Blake invented a method of printing that enabled him to create works in which words and images combine to form pages uniquely rich in content and beautiful in form. It is only through the pages as originally conceived and published by the poet himself that Blake's meaning can be fully experienced. Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now some 400 plates, drawn from the William Blake Trust's acclaimed six-volume Collected Edition, and reproduced under their supervision, provide for the first time ever in one volume what the London Review of Books hailed as 'sumptuous facsimiles...glorious coloured pages...like peeping into a furnace of light through a crack in the door'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8771 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
There has never been an edition of Blake's illuminated books so handsome, its pages filled with images to pore over in utter absorption. David Erdmann's The Illuminated Blake is still in print, and very useful, but the reproductions in that edition are all black and white, where this is in glorious Technicolor. One thing this edition allows the reader to do is register the different scales of Blake's various books--to see, for instance, just how tiny are the pages of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, such that you can completely cover them with your hand, compared with the coffee-table-sized later works. This Thames and Hudson edition of The Complete Illuminated Books is large format, A4 size, which makes for a spacious white border around the smaller images, but allows the larger books to be shown off in all their glory. And glorious they are; a unique, extraordinary sequence of interwoven visual and textual compositions; Blake's distinctively muscular figures (looking, it must be said, oddly modern, as if they have all just stepped out of the gym) sprawl and bound between blocks and columns of printed words. One of the most striking things is the disjunction between words and images at the basic level of legibility. The pictures are direct, vibrant and lucid; visually extremely expressive. Of the colour images, all of them are beautiful, psychedelically hued compositions making use of energetic diagonals and spirals in their composition. Blake's words, on the other hand, are often extremely difficult to read; particularly in the later "prophetic" books. Page after page is filled with minute handwriting in sepia-orange or grey. Its not that Blake's handwriting is unclear, but rather that the sheer bulk of text baffles the eye, copied so neatly onto the marginless block of the page with an obsessive, detailed miniaturised aesthetic. The editors, recognising this, reprint the words in type at the back of the book. But above all this edition drives home the point that Blake cannot be regarded separately as poet or visual artist; these two elements are always fused and co-existing. This wonderful, beautiful book makes that point impressively. --Adam Roberts

Review
`A book to be treasured'
--The Methodist Recorder

Review
`Beautifully reproduces Blake's vibrant images . . . handsome'

Customer Reviews

Brilliant, profound and inspiring!
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Once you begin to read Blakes original works (text and images together - as Blake intended), you'll wonder why you ever read text-only versions. This book is stunning. The quality of the prints is extremely good. Amazon's blurred preview pages do the book no justice. A minority of pages are faint or difficult to read, but this is no fault of the current publishers - blame William Blake! Transcripts of all the texts are included to clarify any illegibility, but are not usually needed as most of the pages are clear and bright.

The editor's introduction to each illuminated book is brief. This allows the reader to dive straight into Blake's visionary world. Never mind if much of the text (especially of the later works) seems at first incomprehensible, Blake's illustrations are so vibrant and powerful on their own that they will keep you fascinated for a long time, and will help to cultivate a hungry curiosity that will eventually offer a way into his mysterious later texts. So what if you don't 'get it' ! Let go and just enter the mystery.

Having said this, many of Blake's earlier texts are much more easily accessible; 'All Religions Are One', 'There is no Natural Religion', 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience' 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', 'The Gates of Paradise'. There is plenty here to offer a rich introduction to Blake's mythology and also to help prepare you for his later works.

This is Blake's 'Bible of Hell' and no household should be without a copy.

Here is a list of the illuminated book included:

* All Religions are One, (Plate 1 Keynes Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum,. Plates 2-10 Huntington Library)
* There is no Natural Religion, (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, copies G and I and L)
* Songs of Innocence and of Experience, (Kings College, Cambridge, copy W)
* The Book of Thel, (Houghton Library, Harvard University, copy J)
* The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, (Pierpont Morgan Library, Copy F)
* The Gates of Paradise, (British Library)
* Visions of the Daughters of Albion, (Houghton Library, copy G)
* America a Prophecy, (The British Museum, Copy H)
* Europe a Prophecy, (Glasgow University Library, copy B)
* The Song of Los, (The British Museum, Copy A)
* The First Book of Urizen, (The British Museum, copy D)
* The Book of Ahania, (Rosenmald Collection, Library of Congress, Wash.D.C., and Fitzwilliam Museum, copy A)
* The Book of Los, (The British Museum, copy A)
* Milton a Poem, (New York Public Library, copy C)
* Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, (Yale Center for British Art, copy E)
* The Ghost of Abel, (Rosenwald Collection, copy A)
* On Homers Poetry [and] on Virgil, (Rosenwald Collection, Copy A)
* Laocoon, (Collection Robert N. Essick, Altadena, Calif., copy B)

Simply fantastic
Blake was a visionary and a genius, a man who truly saw angels walking among men, and a man in whose powerful imagination London became Jerusalem. Blake was one of the most interesting characters of the 18th and 19th centuries, and lived in some of the most tumultuous times of the last thousand years. To truly appreciate Blake, you need to be able to see his illustrations along with his poetry, for Blake was not only a poet, he was also an artist. As I am studying Blake in my English class I can tell you that this is an incredibly worthwhile edition. The reproductions are fantastic; and include some rare plates in their full coloured glory. The volume tells you which edition of the plates are being reproduced (for Blake hand-made and hand-coloured each one individually and so every one is a little bit different), there is a brief introduction to each poem/collection allowing you to place it in context and also included are some of the "alternate" plates - plates found to exist in one version, but not another.
The size of the book allows you to view the plates as they should be viewed; hence, the smaller plates such as those of "Songs of Innocence and Experience" are reproduced to size but you the larger plates are also reproduced at a good size, allowing you to fully appreciate the work. It contains an excellent timeline and also a transcription of all the poems at the back of the book which is highly useful as sometimes, particularly with the smaller plates, Blake's writing can be rather small making it difficult to make out some words or phrases.
This really is a wonderful volume. The reproduction is among the best I have seen of his work - many reproductions tend to be rather faded, but not so with this volume - and I was so impressed with it that I ordered several more for my English teachers to use. If you want to fully appreciate Blake, then you have to see his plates, and this volume provides you with wonderful reproductions. If you have any interest in Blake, then this is the edition to get.

Blake, a poet of pure genious
ok, i am a soldier in the british army and by no means an intellectual. However, when I first set eyes upon this work I found no words in my vocabulary to express to complexity and detail of the world expressed in these pages. I thought that the poems had a visionary outlook upon life shared by no other person. If you like the works of blake or just like to vary your tastes you will find a world that involves you to such a degree that you will know no other poet to be as expressive as william blake in these works...