Illuminated Books

A woman stands beside a flowering plant, looking towards two small figures carried in its blossoms. Above her, the words The Book of Thel occupy a space enclosed by slender branches. In copy B’s title page, brown lines join lettering, stem, leaf and human movement, while pale blue washes pass behind them. The eye can begin by reading the title or by following the arch of vegetation. Both routes lead into the same page. ^[1]

William Blake’s illuminated books invite that movement between reading and looking. Their words have a visible shape; their pictures occupy positions that affect when and how we encounter them. A title can become a small landscape. A figure can interrupt the progress of an argument. An expanse of writing can suddenly give way to a page filled by a body. Printing, colouring and assembly can also make two copies of the same work different objects. ^[1][2]

Thel’s title identifies Blake as author and printer and carries the date 1789. Yet the Blake Archive’s editors place the completion and first printing of its motto and final plate in 1790. Even this short book has more than one beginning to consider. Learning to distinguish a poem’s composition, a plate’s making and an individual copy’s history opens the illuminated books without requiring a reader to master every technical detail first. ^[1][3]

What makes a book illuminated?

Copper served as a surface for drawing and reversed writing in an acid-resistant substance. Etching left the protected marks raised for printing. The impression could preserve the movement of pen and brush. Eaves, Essick and Viscomi stress the freedom this gave him to develop a page while making its plate. ^[4]

Essick and Viscomi point out that Blake’s 1793 advertisement calls America illuminated printing although its copies then had dark inks without added colour. The defining innovation was the printable relief surface. A monochrome impression can be finished; hand colouring and printing several colours are further operations. ^[16]

The category also contains technical exceptions. The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los, both of 1795, are grouped with the illuminated books although their text was printed in intaglio, from recessed lines. Blake’s experiments with the designed book embrace several procedures. ^[16][2]

For the reader, the most useful consequence is simple. The words belong to the image’s making. Look at their size, their spacing, the way a heading enters a page and the room left around a stanza. Those features can be followed as attentively as a figure’s posture. The detailed chemistry of the process belongs to Blake’s etchings; here, its importance lies in the kinds of book it enabled him to make. ^[4]

Reading the whole page

Return to Thel copy B’s title. The tall woman is grounded at the lower left, beneath the word Thel. Her long dress makes an almost continuous vertical beside the tree. Across from her, the two much smaller figures extend their arms above opening flowers. The difference in scale creates an encounter between a relatively still observer and an animated world of growth. The enclosing branches curve overhead, but leave the centre spacious enough for the lettering and the pale blue ground. ^[1]

The letters themselves participate in that variety. The small upper word is plain and upright; the larger word Book contains swelling, curling strokes. The title alternates between solid letters, fine strands and openings of paper. At the foot, the author-and-printer line follows the ground beneath the plants. A statement about who made the object sits within the scene through which we enter it. The page gives reading a setting before it gives the reader a story. ^[1]

Once the poem begins, Thel worries about fading and passing away. A lily, a cloud and a clod of clay answer her through accounts of giving, nourishment and shared life. These speaking presences make the title’s association of human figures with plants newly suggestive. Yet the image is not a diagram assigning one meaning to every flower. Its small airborne bodies and the woman’s watchfulness offer a visual encounter that the poem’s questions can deepen. ^[1][3]

The ending changes that encounter. Thel enters a place of graves and hears disturbing questions about the senses, desire and vulnerability. She flees. Reading back towards the title, the poised woman and open blossoms can now feel suspended before an experience she will find difficult to bear. The image has not changed, but our knowledge of the book has. An illuminated page can acquire force through what comes after it as well as through the lines printed beside it. ^[1][3]

A different relation appears in the Met’s late copy Y of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Its Tyger page places the six stanzas above a small striped animal, with a tree rising beside the writing. Orange-brown lettering, blue around the upper margins and fine green loops outside the inner design give the sheet several boundaries to explore. The creature occupies the ground beneath questions that range far beyond its little patch of landscape. ^[17]

Pause after reading the last stanza and look down. The animal’s large round eye and compact body meet a reader who has just imagined fire, tools and a terrible act of making. The visible creature and the verbal questions operate at different scales. Keeping both in view is more rewarding than insisting that the illustration must resolve the poem’s uncertainty. The book gives us an object to inspect while leaving the act of creation under question. ^[17]

The work of printing and finishing

Eaves, Essick and Viscomi reconstruct early production through groups of impressions: Blake and Catherine printed stock, coloured sheets and assembled books from what was available. Their account places Catherine at the press and in colouring; attributing particular marks on a leaf requires more specific evidence. Repetition and variation belonged to the same workshop. ^[4]

Ink on the plate produces the printed marks; watercolour applied to the sheet can wash across an area or pick out a form. Colour printing instead brings pigments from the plate to the paper. Essick and Viscomi distinguish these operations because a coloured page can contain several stages of work. ^[16]

These books also imagine making as a subject. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a printing house contains dragons hollowing a cave, a viper adorning rock, an eagle opening immense space and lions melting metal. The sequence culminates in forms becoming books and entering libraries. Blake’s fantasy carries matter through successive transformations until it reaches a reader’s world. It asks us to think about the transmission of knowledge through things that are made. ^[18]

The preceding plate connects corrosive printing with a change in perception. Apparent surfaces must be removed so that what they conceal can appear. That analogy gives a material action an imaginative task: an altered surface can make a different experience possible. It remains a passage in a provocative, many-voiced book, rather than a literal set of workshop instructions. Its force grows when the reader can hold the physical page and the visionary claim together. ^[18]

Books offered for sale

Blake presented his invention to potential buyers in the prospectus of 10 October 1793. His opening makes poverty and obscurity a problem of circulation: works can absorb their makers without finding adequate means of reaching the public. He then offers a method uniting painter and poet and claims a substantial reduction in expense. This is an artist’s advertisement, with ambitions and selling arguments of its own. Its claims tell us how he wanted the undertaking to be understood. ^[19]

The list gives those ambitions a range of physical forms. America and Visions of the Daughters of Albion are folios; Thel and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are quartos; the two groups of Songs are octavos. Readers were being offered books of different sizes and prices, all available at Blake’s Lambeth address. The prospectus also advertises engravings and distinguishes them from works in illuminated printing. It presents a varied working practice rather than one solitary book made in isolation. ^[19]

The material promises are part of the appeal. Blake specifies coloured printing and fine wove paper. The paper is the ground on which his elaborate combinations can be handled, collected and read. He closes by declining subscriptions and saying that he will produce works to offer at a fair price. The statement imagines a maker able to place finished work before buyers through his own initiative. It gives the illuminated books a commercial address alongside their visionary worlds. ^[19]

By June 1818, his letter to the collector Dawson Turner describes another situation. Blake says the works are unprofitable to him and expensive to buyers. He offers to print orders, explaining that he has been unable to supply enough copies for general sale through a regular publisher. The letter should not be turned into evidence that a particular order was fulfilled. It does show the practical terms on which he hoped to continue making the books available. ^[20]

Turner’s enquiry also prompts an unusually direct statement about images detached from their writing. Blake explains that prints made for Ozias Humphry had been selected from books where the designs could be printed without words, at a loss to the work. The complete designs accompanied poetic actions and personifications that helped bring them into being. His defence gives a reader a reason to seek the page’s original company, even after first discovering it as a separate picture. ^[20]

What a copy letter tells you

A reference to Thel copy B or Songs copy E identifies a particular surviving book. The letter is useful within the title being discussed; it is not a grade of quality or a code for one colour scheme across Blake’s works. Thel B and Songs B belong to different copy histories. A museum’s accession number then anchors the object within that collection. Together, title, copy designation and collection make a reproduction much easier to follow back to its source. ^[1][5]

A plate and a leaf are also different things. A plate is the printing surface, and the term is commonly extended to its resulting printed design. A leaf is a piece of paper with two sides: its front is the recto and its back the verso. The Morgan’s Marriage copy C has twenty-seven plates printed on fifteen leaves. Twenty-seven designs therefore need not mean twenty-seven separate pieces of paper. The distinction changes how we imagine turning through the actual book. ^[5]

Nor does a printed date automatically date the sheet before us. The Met catalogues its copy Y Tyger as a design of 1794 printed around 1825. The late impression carries an earlier work into a new physical book. A useful catalogue description allows both dates to stand, because they answer different questions. Begin by asking what an offered date describes: the design, its printing, later finishing or the book’s assembly. ^[17]

Four books, four kinds of difference

Songs copy E was assembled for Thomas Butts in 1806 from impressions produced in several earlier sessions. The Archive’s editors explain that Blake recoloured sheets and rewrote weakly printed words. Its apparent coherence was partly achieved through this later attention. The book includes two impressions of Laughing Song and originally lacked The Clod & the Pebble; a later owner added a posthumous impression of the missing poem. A familiar title conceals a sequence of choices by maker and collector. ^[21]

Read that history as an invitation to examine the object, rather than as a reason to distrust every page. The question becomes which stage produced the feature that interests us. A reader studying the poems’ arrangement, the colour or a later addition may be asking about different moments in one book’s life. The full Songs guide follows the collection’s designed openings and verbal exchanges; copy E makes the duration of bookmaking especially clear. ^[21]

For The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the Morgan’s copy F provides another distinction. Its plate 3 carries 1790 in ink, while the museum dates the printing around 1794 and explains that background pigments were applied directly to the shallowly etched plate. A date written on an impression and the date assigned to its printing need to be read separately. ^[22]

Sequence can vary as well. The Archive’s 2016 announcement of copy A records copy G placing plates 15 and 14 before plates 12–13. The reader consequently meets the printing house and the cleansing of perception before the dinner with biblical prophets. The same units create different adjacencies. The editors’ count of nine complete surviving copies belongs to that 2016 account. ^[23]

Thel offers variation on a quieter scale. The Archive’s 2013 account places copies B and I within an early printing that used five inks. B is brown, I green, and both have light watercolour finishing. The line-colour changes before a reader even begins comparing the added washes. Their shared poem does not require them to look alike in every respect. ^[1]

A comparison can begin with a particular question: how might green ink change the weight of the title page’s lines against the paper? First establish the movement of the brown-printed B design, then seek the corresponding page in another copy. Its shared composition gives differences something precise to act upon. ^[1]

The First Book of Urizen makes the differences more extensive. The Archive’s 2018 announcement describes twenty-eight etched plates, with all of them present only in copies A and B among the copies then recorded. Copy J has twenty-five. Its colour-printed impressions are associated with the 1794 production, while the later copy G, placed around 1818 by the editors, removes First from the title. Contents and title are both parts of a copy’s history. ^[2]

The full-page design reproduced with the J announcement is a startling entrance into that material world. A naked body turns head down into a dark opening. One arm extends towards a pale blue ledge, while bent legs occupy the upper space. Long hair points downwards; the torso twists across the centre. Behind it, dense dark surfaces and red streaks make the bright flesh feel exposed. No lines of verse offer an immediate verbal route through this particular page. ^[2]

Its orientation makes the reader work. We recognise a human body but must follow it through an arrangement that resists the steadiness of an upright standing figure. The open black area below the head gives the descent a destination we cannot see into. The poem’s early chapters describe separation, fire, obscurity and painful changes of bodily form. Looking between that language and this image can give the unfamiliar mythology a bodily pressure before every name has become familiar. ^[2][24]

The Library of Congress’s record for copy G preserves a further dating clue: paper watermarked 1815. Its catalogue distinguishes the title’s 1794 from a later printing, while the Archive’s account supplies the approximate 1818 placement. A watermark belongs to the paper’s manufacture and sets a limit on how early an impression on that paper can be. It cannot alone supply the day on which a plate went through the press. ^[2][25]

A page beyond its book

The illuminated plate could also have a life outside a complete copy. Yale’s proof of the Europe frontispiece, The Ancient of Days, is catalogued around 1820, in brown ink. The other side bears a colour-printed proof from Jerusalem, plate 30. The recto and verso bring two projects together on one sheet. Their coexistence is a useful reminder that a surviving piece of paper can preserve workshop relations that a reproduction of one face leaves invisible. ^[26]

The title Europe carries 1794 in Blake’s text, while the Yale sheet’s catalogue date belongs to this later proof. Those dates do not describe a contradiction. They show a design remaining available for renewed printing. The object also makes it important to distinguish a complete book, a single impression and the composition that can recur across them. Each gives a different kind of access to Blake’s work. ^[26][27]

Blake himself makes books an unstable subject within the prophecies. In Urizen, the central figure declares that he has placed wisdom in metal books and presents a book of brass whose laws demand a single command and measure. The book is an instrument of authority within a printed book that makes the reader confront its consequences. Material permanence can preserve a vision, but it can also give fixed form to a restrictive claim. ^[24]

That tension keeps the illuminated books from becoming a celebration of beautiful manufacture alone. A page may contain an assertion that another page will disturb; a speaker can make a claim that the surrounding action tests. The same reader who follows a branch through the lettering must also ask who is speaking and what follows from the speech. The designed object holds those acts of attention together. ^[3][24][18]

Where to begin

For the most concentrated relation between an assertion and a design, try There is No Natural Religion. The Morgan describes its copy G through aphorisms and emblematic images. Each short unit offers a manageable place to ask how an image relates to a proposition. Then compare the next unit before deciding that the book has established one unchanging rule for their relationship. ^[28]

For a first encounter with narrative, choose a complete short work and an identified copy. Thel is useful because its movement is compact: questioning, answers, entry into another place and retreat. Read the whole poem before trying to settle what its ending means. Then revisit the title and ask how its open flowers and watching figure prepare an expectation that the ending complicates. A beginning and an ending can speak across the book without furnishing a single compulsory moral. ^[1][3]

For short poems and concentrated page designs, turn to Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Start with one complete designed page, such as the Met’s Tyger, then examine its relation to the surrounding collection. Preserve the difference between hearing the poem and looking at its printed setting. The small animal beneath the writing is part of this particular encounter, while the words can continue to trouble the reader after the image has been closed. ^[17]

For satire, argument and abrupt changes of voice, choose The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The printing-house passage offers a route into its imaginative transformations, but it becomes richer when read between the cleansing of perception and the later disputes about productive energy. Let the text’s separate forms retain their different speeds. A proverb, a visionary journey and a dialogue ask for different kinds of listening. ^[18]

For a first sustained prophecy, Urizen offers actions that can be followed before its mythology is mastered: division, measurement, lawgiving and the formation of a constrained world. Its pictures can make those actions palpable, although an image need not illustrate the lines immediately beside it. Keep a record of what a figure does before deciding what the name must always mean. That approach lets the visual and verbal evidence develop together. ^[24]

Europe a Prophecy enlarges the scale again. Its opening moves from a tiny fairy and imagined flower-leaf book into the speech of a shadowy female and a world of immense forces. Later, Urizen’s book reaches kings and priests, and the action names London’s streets and buildings. Read those changes of size and setting as part of its movement: the poem keeps bringing vast powers into contact with a recognisable place. ^[27]

The later Milton and Jerusalem call for longer attention, but their opening addresses offer footholds. Milton calls on painters, sculptors and architects and contains the lyric beginning “And did those feet in ancient time”. The city named in that lyric is not the title of the book containing it. Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion is a separate long poem, whose address to the public speaks directly to lovers of books. ^[29][30]

In that address, Blake explains his changing cadences and syllable counts, fitted to passages of different intensity. His declaration “Therefore I print” places the act within a religious account of inspiration, while his prose insists that words and letters receive deliberate study. This gives the reader a practical invitation: listen for changes in pace, look at the placing of language and allow an energetic passage to differ from a gentle one. The page is the meeting place of those decisions. ^[30]

An illuminated book becomes more accessible through repeated, particular encounters. Read one passage; look at the whole page; find the named copy; return to the neighbouring pages. Blake’s materials reward that patience because the details remain active: the woman under the title, the animal below the verse, the body falling into darkness and the letter that joins a stem. They keep inviting the reader back from a general idea of Blake to something that can actually be seen. ^[1][17][2]