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“Oh dear – a night mare,” the tweet read. A familiar image popped up on my Twitter feed just the other day, of an engraving of Henry Fuseli’s “The Night Mare” (1795), referencing the Blake Archive Twitter account and shared from a 2008 issue of the Blake Illustrated Quarterly (BIQ) by Anke Timmermann, historian of medieval and early modern alchemy, medicine, and science, former Munby Fellow at Cambridge University Library (2013/14), and antiquarian bookseller at Bernard Quaritch Ltd.

Since I’ve just joined Team Marginalia, Laura said it might be useful for me to take a look at a few books and articles that discuss marginalia in general and Blake’s in particular. I’ve been browsing through them in the last couple of days and I thought others might find a few of their remarks about marginalia to be of interest. For instance, while Mark O’Connell’s article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-marginal-obsession-with-marginalia) considers the reader’s collaborative engagement with other readers a fundamental affordance of marginalia, he also emphasizes the intimate nature of marginalia as writing – the private, often perhaps emotional conversation between book and reader that it might be indecent to peep into. Jason Snart on the other hand views Blake’s marginalia as disruptive. The “mark”  poses a challenge to the monolithic authority of the printed text, exposing its weakness and thereby opening it up for argument, discussion, appropriation and rejection (Jason Snart, The Torn Book 124). He focuses more on the competitive nature of marginalia rather than the qualities of affection  and intimacy. Here are examples of cases where Blake agrees vehemently with the author and where he equally vehemently disagrees:

This summer, members of BAND have made serious headway on numerous projects. Receipts and letters have been transcribed and edited, many transcriptions have been proofread, provenance information has been collected, and Teams Marginalia and Color Code have been working to make guidelines for these projects as a whole.

As I wrap up my work with the Archive, I decided to deviate from posting specifically about my work, instead, choosing to write about a family of groundhogs living outside the window of the Archive Office. If you follow us on Twitter, you may have read Sarah’s posts about them in late May. Regardless, they provided much amusement for us working at the Archive over the summer. Sometimes, we’d take breaks to watch the young groundhogs playing, and on more than one occasion, we found ourselves looking up information about them online–in lieu of working on Blake…

Early last week Team Marginalia decided we were finally ready to develop a test tagset for transcribing Blake’s marginalia. We spent a lot of time trying out this new tagset using Blake’s annotated copy of J.C. Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man. 

The above image is a pair of pages from Blake’s annotated copy of Aphorisms on Man. When we transcribe, we will be treating each page, not each pair of pages, as an object.

While finishing up work on a set of Blake’s letters from the Westminster Archives, I ran across a question that has made me a minor expert on a very minor piece of history: the difference between wafers and wax seals in nineteenth-century England. My curiosity about the difference in these two methods of sealing letters came about when I encountered the following seal on Blake’s Letter to Mr. Butts, 10 January 1802: