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.