Enfilade

As posted on C-18L:

William Blake, "The Ancient of Days," 1794 (London: BM); Wikimedia Commons

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Europe a Prophecy copy G, from the Morgan Library and Museum. Europe, extant in nine copies, is dated 1794 on its title plate. The first six copies were color printed that year; four of these copies were printed on both sides of the leaves and two were printed on one side only. Copy G belongs to the former issue and joins in the Archive copy E from the same issue and copy B, more heavily printed, from the latter. It also joins copy H, the only monochrome copy, printed in 1795, and copy K, from the last printing session, c. 1821. With each printing session represented in the William Blake Archive, users can trace the full printing history of Europe.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Europe copy G are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of this or any of the other illuminated books. With our new Related Works feature, launched last month, users can access related materials through active links on the work index pages and in the Show Me menu on the object view pages. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to all copies of Europe in the Archive.

With the publication of this copy of Europe, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of seventy-one copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, sketches, and water color drawings, including Blake’s illustrations to Thomas Gray’s Poems, water color and engraved illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the large color printed drawings of 1795 and c. 1805, the Linnell and Butts sets of the Book of Job water colors and the sketchbook containing drawings for the engraved illustrations to the Book of Job, the water color illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave, and all nine of Blake’s water color series illustrating the poetry of John Milton.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive