The Complete Illuminated Books

Citation

James, S. (2001), "The Complete Illuminated Books", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 3, pp. 146-159. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.3.146.10

Between the medieval illuminated manuscript and the modern artist’s book, the productions of William Blake stand just about alone. In English literary and cultural history, of course, Blake himself, the visionary poet, artist and engraver, also stands alone. He invented a method of copper engraving as the equivalent of a woodcut block, joining text and illustration into a single intimate whole, permitting limitless copies to be struck but allowing as much diversity through hand finishing. His aim was as visionary as his work, to “empower and liberate all writers, enabling them to express themselves freely to a universal audience without leave from worldly authority.”

His own works in this medium are reproduced here in their entirety in full colour and to actual size (except for Laocoön which had to be reduced to fit even this large format volume), revealing to a wider audience how “the pages of the illuminated books offer delights for the eye and excitement to the imagination that are independent of full understanding of textual and visual significances.”

In 366 colour plates all 19 books are reproduced from copies in major libraries: plates from The William Blake Trust’s Collected Edition, themselves only available hitherto in major libraries, are now made available (just as Blake wished and intended) to the world at large in a single volume. The reproductions are prefaced by an introduction by David Bindman, by a bibliography and Web site reference: what would Blake have made of the Internet? In one of the many newspaper features recently inspired by the major exhibition in London – and obviously not unconnected with the publication of this book – I note the probably correct suggestion that he would have grasped and mastered the new medium enthusiastically (the Peter Greenaway of his time). The loss of these remarkable volumes as physical visual objects would have been considerable. There is also a chronology and the work is supplemented by transcripts of the texts. The whole remarkable volume, while large and unwieldy, is produced to the highest standards of this publisher and so is a visual delight in itself.

Then what a literally wonderful world is revealed: some of Blake’s work – his major anthologised poems and some reproductions of his images – is already familiar, but now his whole output is presented. Much of it is difficult: the diffuse, allusive and elusive texts of the religious prophet. But set altogether in its visual context it takes on the added beauty and significance Blake intended. There is so much to say about these amazing pages, the word and the image combined into a new whole and presaging so much of what is orthodox in the modern artist’s book. Suffice to say for our own purposes that more collections than just art libraries will be a natural home for this remarkable volume.