letters | Hell’s Printing Press

Working with Vertical Text

13 April 2016

It wasn’t until I began looking through all the letters in the Blake Archive that I realized just how unique Blake’s second November 22^nd 1802 letter to Thomas Butts really is. This uniqueness poses some interesting problems when it comes to encoding. The text of this letter fills both leaves of paper from top to bottom and comes very close to the margins. It includes both prose and verse, and the verse is in two columns that begin on the first page and end on the second.

BAND

Transcribing Blake 101

20 November 2015

This is my second semester working for the William Blake Archive, and I have to admit that the work has been a bit more complicated than I expected.

BAND, Digital Humanities

Blake In Photoshop, Part 2.5: Can You Read This?

29 October 2015

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a simple Photoshop technique for recovering faded text in old manuscripts. I used a couple of objects from Four Zoas as a demo because we’ve been working a lot with Four Zoas and, well, it’s pretty hard to read.

It wasn’t a true experiment, though. Because FZ has been so heavily scrutinized by scholars past and present, nearly every conceivable reading is documented and available for verification. In other words, I was working towards a recovery that I already had in mind. Not-so-boldly-going where many have gone before.

OK, so maybe that’s fine for proof-of-concept. But what about a real test? Could we try this out on something we really had trouble reading? Wouldn’t you know it—a recent letter acquisition provided exactly that opportunity.

BAND

On This Day: 2 July

2 July 2014

I’ve always been a fan of those “On This Day” features you often see in newspapers and now online. This is probably picked up from my Dad who has a wonderful memory for dates and can usually be relied upon to find and remember the most random coincidences (for example, did you know that Kublai Khan and Bruce Springsteen share a birthday?). As we get ready for 4 July celebrations here in the US, I thought I’d spend this post thinking about today, a less remembered date but significant in its own way.

So here we go: On This Day, 2 July, the Battle of Marston Moor was fought, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, a UFO crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, and Hermann Hesse celebrated his birthday. Also on 2 July (note that seamless transition), Blake wrote a letter to his patron and friend, George Cumberland.

BAND

This Day In Blake History: Gossip!

28 May 2014

Over the past year, the Archive’s publication of existing Blake letters has offered a unique perspective on the personal history of Blake, which complements the view his professional character through his numerous illustrations and engravings.

To this point, the Blake Archive has published two batches of letters, with a third on the way in the coming months.

Working with and reading the letters, we often get a cheap thrill in the office by joking about what Blake was doing on a particular day a couple hundred years ago. (Yes, we realize how sad this is.) More often than not, Blake is pretty damn cold.

BAND, Uncategorized

“till the Cold is gone”: Blake, Rochester NY and talking about the weather

17 April 2014

Being British, one of my favourite pastimes is talking about the weather (usually in a tone of complaint whilst drinking a cup of tea, of course), and I’ve always considered myself to be rather good at it — that is, until I moved to western New York. The Rochester snow makes a bit of British rain seem like a pleasant shower, a February blizzard makes London fog charmingly atmospheric and the dramatic temperature fluctuations make grabbing your coat in the morning as simple as remembering to brush your teeth. This week, for example, has seen alterations in weather from 80 degrees and sunshine to 25 degrees and snow (27° to -3° for our Celsius-loving readers). Anyway, as I was thinking this over, I started wondering what Blake thought about the weather.

Publications

Publication Announcement – Letters (1800-1805)

31 March 2014

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of our second installment of Blake’s letters, the correspondence of 1800-1805, which includes his three years with patron William Hayley in the coastal village of Felpham, West Sussex, and the frightening months leading up to his trial for sedition.

The letters in this group supplement the Archive’s publication in November 2013 of Blake’s illustrations to works by Hayley, including his Essay on Sculpture, the broadside ballad Little Tom the Sailor,

BAND, XML

To the Letters

5 March 2014

Since re-grouping in January, the members of BAND have been working earnestly on a variety of new and ongoing projects, including Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue, Receipts, The French Revolution, Chaucer, Prospectus, The Four Zoas, Genesis, Tiriel, and additional groups of Blake’s letters. In an effort to do more shameless plugging for our imminent letters publication, I’d like to share why I decided to continue with the letters project.

BAND

The final countdown: proofing the letters

22 January 2014

Here at BAND, we’re deep into proofreading a batch of Blake’s letters that are currently being prepared for publication. The large amount of different objects (over thirty letters) means that everyone on the team has been involved in the process and so we have been recording any questions and discrepancies that we note on a shared Google doc. As I discussed in a post a few weeks ago, the term “proofreading” at BAND means a lot more that the word usually suggests, and this current project provides some good working examples of this part of the process.