Morris Eaves

Blake's early works

“If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward,” especially when the resulting productions are “of equal magnitude and consequence” with those “of any age or country” (E 692). So maintained thirty-five-year-old William Blake in an etched prospectus addressed “To the Public” and dated 10 October 1793, two weeks before the execution of Marie Antoinette would dominate the London news. “Works now published and on Sale at Mr. Blakes, No. 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth” comprised two “Historical Engraving[s]” - Job and Edward and Elinor - two “small book[s] of engraving” - The Gates of Paradise and The History of England (now lost or never actually published) - and, extending this range of concern with matters national, spiritual, and educational in diverse media: America, a Prophecy ; Visions of the Daughters of Albion ; The Book of Thel ; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ; Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience . In his only recorded use of the phrase now synonymous with his greatest achievement, Blake described these latter six books as “in Illuminated Printing.” The prices ranged from three to twelve shillings (almost a laborers weekly wage). Not advertised were the authors two conventionally type-set volumes, Poetical Sketches of ten years before and The French Revolution of 1791; missing also from the prospectus were Blakes five-year-old first experiments in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion and, understandably, two manuscripts: a burlesque set in an island in the moon and a verse narrative about a mythic patriarch, Tiriel . None of the works he then advertised, which include those best known today, were to find a large market, but Blake later commented that sales were “sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an Artist which was the chief thing Intended” (letter of 9 June 1818, E 771).

The political aesthetic of Blake's images

Reading William Blakes illuminated books is, to say the least, an uncanny experience. Some people find it unappealing. Not seeing any immediately obvious meaning, not even recognizing in Blakes text any of the conventions and cues which normally guide readings along, they find themselves repelled by the texts seemingly obscure words and bizarre images, and ultimately find reading Blake a tiring and unrewarding activity, involving a great deal of effort and very little definite accomplishment. Other readers admire Blakes work for the very same reason: confronting the seemingly impenetrable wall of words and images, they arm themselves with formidable scholarly guides, dictionaries and code books, writings of long-forgotten mystics and visionaries, and they seek out the texts buried treasures, relishing the extraction of what they take to be the mysterious knowledge contained within, access to which is seemingly barred to all but those who have passed certain (presumably secret) rituals of initiation.

National Arts and Disruptive Technologies in Blake’s Prospectus of 1793

After all, Blake’s so-called ‘prospectus’ of 1793 (E692-3) — titled and dated ‘To the Public October 10, 1793’ — is just an ad. It would be a forgettable bit of self-promotion were it not also his first and, as it turned out, only public statement on illuminated printing. But, as the prospectus gives us ‘Illuminated Books’ in ‘Illuminated Printing,’ the very terms by which we have come to know and name that body of work, and as those illuminated books have settled into their place as the centerpiece of Blake’s artistic identity and reputation, the little prospectus has become a key document, mined for insight into one man’s printing and publishing practices and his artistic ambitions.1

The William Blake Archive: The Medium When the Millennium Is the Message

It is easier than most people probably suppose to be millennial about editing. The closest thing to religious hope left to most of us may be found in the dreams of editors as they come to think of themselves as, modesdy, the temporary guardians of important messages hurling down perilous lines of transmission from origin to unknown ultimate destination or, less modestly, as the foundation builders of a new age of enlightenment and understanding built on a cornerstone of perfect communication.

MRC for compression of Blake Archive images

The William Blake Archive is part of an emerging class of electronic projects in the humanities that may be described as hypermedia archives. It provides structured access to high-quality electronic reproductions of rare and often unique primary source materials, in this case the work of poet and painter William Blake. Due to the extensive high frequency content of Blakes paintings (namely, colored engravings), they are not suitable for very efficient compression that meets both rate and distortion criteria at the same time. Resolving that problem, the authors utilized modified Mixed Raster Content (MRC) compression scheme -- originally developed for compression of compound documents -- for the compression of colored engravings. In this paper, for the first time, we have been able to demonstrate the successful use of the MRC compression approach for the compression of colored, engraved images. Additional, but not less important benefits of the MRC image representation for Blake scholars are presented: because the applied segmentation method can essentially lift the color overlay of an impression, it provides the student of Blake the unique opportunity to recreate the underlying copperplate image, model the artists coloring process, and study them separately.

Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England: The Comedy of the English School of Painting

The disturbance and surprise always just under the serenely consolidated skin of twentieth-century Blake studies originate in our awareness of the very extraordinary maneuvers required to get Blake into the literary canon: there are skeletons in the closet and loose ends untied. Since the single most profound maneuver in the history of Blakes reputation was to turn him into a poet, chiefly through editing his illuminated books by literary standards of legibility, most of the omissions, suppressions, and distortions involve the Blake who lived and died an artist in a circle of artists. The editing project adjusted his practice to the needs of a literary canon, but it left his theories untouched and unexplained. Blakes literary placement encouraged literary critics to look for the literary theorist in him. Most, like W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, gave it up as a bad deal and declared that Blake was anything but a literary theorist.1 The most promising development came through Northrop Frye, who has repeatedly credited Blake for teaching him literary theory, but no one would mistake Fryes theories for Blakes. What really cranked Fryes engine was the intellectual exertion required to transform a stratum of Blakes thought-here I would avoid saying theory-into the basis of a literary theory. But, curiously, the process of stabilizing the institutional definition of Blake as one of the six major English romantic poets seems to have lib-