Publications

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a digital edition of Blake’s water color drawings illustrating Edward Young’s The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts. These 537 designs are a considerable proportion of Blake’s total production as a visual artist. The water colors join two copies of Blake’s engraved illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) previously published in the Archive, one uncolored and one with contemporary hand coloring.

The William Blake Archive is pleased to launch the virtual Lightbox, a major addition to the Archive’s array of digital tools. It replaces an earlier version discontinued in 2013 because of security issues. This entirely new Lightbox has been specially developed for the Archive by Tae Lerch of UNC’s Office of Arts & Sciences Information Services and Michael Fox, the Archive’s assistant editor, who has also implemented many new features in our Reading View and significant improvements to the Archive’s server and to its back end and interface. Together, these new tools and enhancements amount to a relaunching of the Blake Archive.

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of digital editions of the manuscript and the designs for Blake’s Tiriel.

The Manuscript. Tiriel (c. 1789) comprises a manuscript of fifteen pages of eight numbered sections plus three sketches and twelve known finished drawings (three untraced since 1863). Most of the drawings are more or less clearly related to passages in the manuscript. Originally, Blake may have planned to engrave the writing and the illustrations or a selection of them and assemble the two in a set sequence—with or without a publisher. Alternatively, he may have envisioned a typographic work with engraved illustrations. But he never saw the project through to completion, and the materials are now dispersed.

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a digital edition of Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion Copy F, from the Morgan Library and Museum. Jerusalem is Blake’s masterpiece in illuminated printing, consisting of 100 relief and white-line etchings divided into four chapters. It is his longest illuminated book and its plates are among his largest, at approximately 22.5 x 16 cm. Though dated 1804 on its title plate, it was not printed in its entirety until c. 1820. Sixty plates may have been completed by 1807; a few examples were exhibited in 1812. The printing of 1820 produced Copies A, C, and D. In the next year, Blake printed Copies B (chapter 1 only, Plates 1-25) and E. Blake printed Copy F in 1827. Copies H-J are posthumous. Most lifetime copies have hand tinting in gray or black, but only Copies B and E are colored. There are two arrangements of the plates in chapter 2, early (Copies A and C) and late (Copies D and E).

In 2014 the Blake Archive added a new wing devoted to searchable HTML and PDF editions of back issues of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Today’s publication—all 40 issues from the 1970s—is the final big installment of the Archive’s ongoing project of making freely available, and fully searchable, over four decades of the journal, thus making public some of the most important scholarly work done in Blake studies over the past half century.

In collaboration with UNC Libraries and ITS Research Computing, the William Blake Archive is launching on 12 December 2016 a complete and transformative redesign of its website. This new site, www.blakearchive.org, retains all of the features of the previous site, which had become so indispensable to Blake scholars, and offers vast improvements, making it easier than ever for educators and scholars to access and study Blake’s inimitable works.