Recently I updated the journal’s index to include links to articles published in the 1980s, which are now freely available in the Blake Archive’s repository of Blake Quarterly back issues. The archive released these articles at the end of April; in the first part of the summer my colleagues in the archive team here at Rochester added the links to the index before I checked them and published the revised version. Of course the archive has since released issues from the 1960s (at my behest, so I have no one to blame but myself), which means that the task of adding links for their contents now lurks on my to-do list.
The issues from the 1980s contain some of our most frequently requested articles before they became available online, including Anne K. Mellor, “Blake’s Portrayal of Women,” and Alicia Ostriker, “Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality,” as well as the group of articles on The Four Zoas in spring 1985.
The journal’s index, which I maintain in my capacity as the managing editor, is organized differently from the archive’s index of the journal’s contents, which is maintained by Adam McCune and his team at UNC Chapel Hill. The archive divides the contents into multiple categories that appear in the journal (Articles, Corrections, Discussion, Minute Particulars, Reviews, etc.), whereas as I have just two (Articles, that is, pretty much everything that’s not a review, and Reviews). I’ve pondered which is better and even wondered about listing everything in the journal’s index purely alphabetically, with the category included as part of each entry. Then I decide that redoing the index would be too much work to contemplate. That said, if anyone has a comment about any aspect of the journal’s index and how it could be improved, I’d be glad to hear it.
Last but not least, Adam sent a message to the Blake Archive internal mailing list earlier in the summer about his team’s work on the back issues of the journal:
There is now at least one emendation for every single print-only issue, from 1.1 to 44.4. Some of these emendations are the result of the transition to a new medium—for example, omitting the image credit for a black-and-white photograph of one of Blake’s works because we have substituted a WBA [William Blake Archive] image. Other emendations correct typos or apply printed corrections to the original articles. If you are curious, feel free to browse emendations.
His last sentence refers to the list of emendations at http://bq.blakearchive.org/Emend. As the managing editor of the journal my eyes went straight to the sentence “Other emendations correct typos or apply printed corrections to the original articles.” That cannot be, I thought—no issue that I produced can possibly have a typo or require a correction! But then I looked at the list and of course there are plenty of each, and I had to take comfort in the idea that at least I haven’t been the managing editor for the whole history of the journal, so I’m responsible for just some of the mistakes. Such are the weaselly ways to make oneself feel better!