Blake Quarterly

In the six months since my last blog post, I have continued working through Adam McCune’s wordlists to check for misspellings in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. I have moved from lowercase to uppercase, from s-z to S-Z. I’m about 60% through the second list, and have been training with Katherine Calvin to work on image markup next, a process which Adam Engel has described in a previous post. My time spent sporadically drifting between issues, my editorial swerve guided by individual words, is coming to an end (at least for now). But as I move away from this task, I would be remiss if I did not mention how much I have learned in the process of wandering through the randomness of single-occurrence words.

No, we’re not giving away the Blake Quarterly (though sometimes we would like to). I previously promised a couple of giveaways to celebrate the fiftieth volume of the journal. The first is something that I would very much like, and I hope it will be equally appealing to others who are interested in Blake.

The first issue in our fiftieth volume (vol. 50, no. 1, summer 2016) was published this week (http://www.blakequarterly.org). It contains:

The upcoming volume year is our fiftieth, an anniversary that seems perversely inevitable given Morton Paley’s words in the first issue of 15 June 1967: “I think the Newsletter should be just that—not an incipient journal.” That issue included a report on the rediscovery of the Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook and solicited opinions on the dating of the two Nights the Seventh in The Four Zoas.

Morton has been the editor since the beginning, and Morris Eaves for almost that long. Thanks to them and to all those who have contributed and given support, we have reached a milestone that we intend to celebrate in our usual small but mighty fashion.

Part 1 of Michael Phillips’s description of organizing the Ashmolean Blake exhibition of 2014–15 appeared last week. Here is the continuation.

SJ: Once you had the framework of Blake as apprentice and master, how did you determine which other works you wanted to include? What came next?

MP: First I needed to see the galleries that would be used for the exhibition. I also needed to obtain a floor plan to use at home to be able to check the wall space available for hanging exhibits and the floor space available for display cases.