Saturday 15 March 2014

Rylands Blake project 4. America (1887)

WRAPPER TITLE
No........ [ink numeral and Muir’s signature] Price. £ . . [ink price] | AMERICA, | A PROPHECY, | BY WILLIAM BLAKE, 1793 | [rule] |FACSIMILIED AT EDMONTON, ANNO 1887. | By W. MUIR, H. T. MUIR, E. DRUITT, & M. HUGHES. | This is the first part of the second volume of my edition of 50 copies of the Works of | William Blake, The first volume contained “The Songs of Innocence” and of “Experience;” | “Thel;” “The Visions of the Daughters of Albion;” “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell;” | “There is no Natural Religion; “ and “Milton.” Several of them can still be obtained from | the booksellers. | Mr. Quaritch, of 15, Piccadilly, W. is my only Agent. | W. MUIR. | January 1887.

FACSIMILE TITLE PAGE
AMERICA | a | PROPHECY | LAMBETH | Printed by William Blake in the year 1793.

DESCRIPTION
18 leaves of lithographic facsimile printed in blue-black ink.
In blue wrappers. Rebound in crimson half leather, cloth sides.



CONTENTS
[Muir’s leaf numbering added in ink]
O-1 frontispiece
O-2 title page AMERICA a PROPHECY
O-3 Preludium | The shadowy daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc
O-4 Silent as despairing love and strong as jealousy
O-5 A PROPHECY | The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent.
O-6 Appear to the Americans upon the cloudy night.
O-7 Albions Angel stood beside the Stone
O-8 The morning comes; the night decays, the watchman leave | their stations;
O-9 In thunders ends the voice Then Albions Angel wrathful burnt
O-10 The Terror answerd: I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed tree:
O-11 Sound! sound! my loud war-trumpets & alarm my Thirteen Angels!
O-12 Thus wept the Angel voice& as he wept the terrible blasts

O-13 Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d
O-14 So cried he, rending off his robe & throwing down his scepter
O-15 What time the thirteen Governors that England sent con-vene
O-16 In the flames stood & view’d the armies drawn out in the sky
O-17 On Albions Angels: then the Pestilence began in streaks of red
O-18 Over the hills, the vales, the cities, rage the red flames fierce:

RYLANDS
Accession number R83354
Pressmark F2/4A7
Provenance Gift of W. Muir (?)


ANNOTATIONS

[wrapper, in pencil] This is Mr Muir’s Master Copy of the British Museum America 18pp. | printed in blue [illegible] | 23 copies were sold by Messrs. Quaritch

[printed] No......... [in ink] 43 Wm Muir [printed] Price, £ . . [in pencil] 4 – 4 - 0


CONTEMPORARY REVIEW
THE latest issued of Mr. Muir’s facsimiles of the works of W. Blake (Quaritch) is America: a Prophecy, with the date Lambeth, 1793, and it is the first part of the second volume of the edition of fifty copies.  Mr. Muir and his assistants have employed a process like that of Blake, that is, a kind of etching or mechanical dry point work, very easy to a draughtsman like Blake, and not typographical at all.  The designs and the text were all engraved together on copper plates and printed as one.  The reproduction, from an example printed in blue, of these impressions is as good as it can be, the monochrome of ‘America’ lending itself to the operation much better than the tinted and handworked autographs of former members of the series.  It is hardly needful to say that the “Prophecy” is of such a kind as would have very much astonished George III.  It includes several of Blake’s finest designs, veritable triumphs of his genius, including the revival of the dead above the grave when morning breaks, the King of England (if that be the name of the old bearded man seated on clouds with his arms extended), the old man entering the tomb (a design Blake repeated), and the crouching figure on the last page.  Blake intended that no copy of this work should be issued until it had been coloured by hand.  The finer impressions are delightfully coloured.  The text of ‘America’ is utterly without coherent meaning; only a few lines here and there are intelligible.  It is, as even Mr. Gilchrist admitted, “verse hard to fathom; with far too little nature behind it, or backbone; a redundancy of mere invention”; but the fact is that what is utterly structureless and inharmonious cannot be called verse, and that “mere tossing about of ideas and words” is not invention.  With this issue we have received a facsimile of the illustrated ballad of Little Tom the Sailor, well known to Blake’s admirers.—THE ATHENÆUM, no. 3102 (9 April 1887), page 486 ("ILLUSTRATED BOOKS").



COMMENT
A stunningly good monochrome facsimile. I don’t understand how this is both No 43 and Muir’s "master copy". Are the lithographic (zincographic) plates cut to size? How else explain the suggestion of plate mark?

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