The nature of William Blake's genius is most completely expressed in his Illuminated 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 conceived and published by the poet himself that Blake's meaning can be fully experienced.Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now some 400 plates, drawn from The William Blake Trust's acclaimed six-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 "Sumptuous facsimiles . . . glorious colored pages . . . like peeping into a furnace of light through a crack in the door".
- ISBN10 0500233608
- ISBN13 9780500233603
- Publish Date 4 October 1982
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 October 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Thames & Hudson Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 192
- Language English