WILLIAM BLAKE

The nature of William Blake's genius is most completely expressed in his Illumin
ated Books. As poet/artist Blake invented a method of printing that enabled him
to create works in which words and images combine to form pages uniquely rich in
content and beautiful in form. It is only through the pages as originally conce
ived and published by the poet himself that Blake's meaning can be fully experie
nced.



Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfill
ed: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very smal
l numbers. Now some 400 plates, drawn from the William Blake Trust's acclaimed s
ix-volume Collected Edition, and reproduced under their supervision, provide for
the first time ever in one volume what the London Review of Books hailed as 'su
mptuous facsimiles...glorious coloured pages...like peeping into a furnace of li
ght through a crack in the door'.