Blake: reproducing the works in Illuminated Printing

Every literary work that descends to us operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographical codes on the other. We recognize the latter simply by looking at a medieval literary manuscript—or at any of William Blake’s equivalent illuminated texts produced (in the teeth of) the age of mechanical reproduction.—MCGANN 

The challenge from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (up to and including the present day), has been to reproduce William Blake’s work in Illuminated Printing in a way that provides fidelity not just to the image but to the reading experience. To cite one of the founders of the Blake Archive, “what is selected for reproduction and how it is reproduced affects the Blake we know and how we know him” (Viscomi). For each attempt at reproduction we need to specify, rigorously and precisely, what these gains and losses entail and especially what they reveal about presuppositions underlying reading and writing.

I remember vividly the first time I examined the Glasgow University copy of Visions of the Daughters of Albion. It was not just the way that the colours in the bound book sang so freshly—the book had been bound when in Beckford’s ownership and barely handled since—being printed on both sides of the sheet, the book was difficult to display and thus had seldom been placed on exhibition. Above all, being printed on both sides of the sheet made Visions a real book—the unit was the opening not the individual page. Nowadays Glasgow no longer allows access to its Visions except in special circumstances and instead directs readers to the Blake Archive where Blake’s books have been reduced to individual isolated pages.

Katherine Hayles offers what at first appears an opposing view

[The William Blake Archive] is informed throughout by an enlightened editorial policy, for the editors state that they take the "work" to be the book considered as a unique physical object. ... The editors make canny use of the computer's awesome simulation powers to render the screen display as much like the printed book as possible. They provide a calibration applet that lets users set screen resolution so the original page dimensions can be reproduced. They include a graphical help section that uses illustrations of pages to indicate the site's functionalities and capabilities. Clearly an enormous amount of thought, time, and money has gone into the construction of this site.

Yet she ends up reinforcing my objections.

The editors of the Blake Archive are meticulous in insisting that even small differences in materiality potentially affect meaning, so they have gone to a great deal of trouble to compile not only different works but extant copies of the same work. Yet these copies are visually rendered on screen using a technology that differs far more in its materiality from print than the print copies do from one another. The computer is able to simulate print documents accurately precisely because it is completely unlike print in its architecture and functioning. The simulation of visual accuracy, which has rendered an invaluable service in rescuing Blake from text-only editions that suppressed the crucial visual dimensions of his work, is nevertheless achieved at the cost of cybernetic difference. Consider for example the navigation functionalities, which allow the user to juxtapose many images on screen to compare different copies and versions of a work. To achieve a comparable (though not identical) effect with print-if it could be done at all-would require access to rare books rooms, a great deal of page turning, and the constant shifting of physical artifacts. A moment's thought suffices to show that changing the navigational apparatus of a work changes the work. Translating the words on a scroll into a codex book, for example, radically alters how a reader encounters the work; by changing how the work means, such a move alters what it means. One of the insights electronic textuality makes inescapably clear is that navigational functionalities are not merely ways to access the work but part of a work's signifying structure.

The first attempt to reproduce Blake's works Illuminated Printing was made in his lifetime. Copy P of the Songs (the copy that Blake prepared for Rebekah Bliss around 1805) gave rise to two entirely hand-made copies which Bentley designates copies Alpha and Beta. Bentley comments

It is difficult to explain why a facsimile was made at all, probably at considerably greater trouble and expense than would have been involved in buying a colored copy from Blake. The commission suggests either that the commissioner of the facsimile did not know how to locate an original copy for sale, or that the facsimile maker was imitating Blake’s work as an act of love. Whatever the motives, he, or they—created works of remarkable beauty which, even at a remove from Blake’s originals, display to us much that is uniquely lovely in his Songs (459).

I suggest William Fuller Maitland (1813-1876) as the probable facsimilist—on the basis both of his close family relationship to Rebekah Bliss (he was the grandson of Rebekah's cousin Ebenezer) and his future fame as a Blake collector. On 1 June 1887, Christie’s sold as lots 255-256, 258, Jerusalem (E), Thel (a) and attendant prints, and coloured Night Thoughts (E) from the Stanstead Hall collection; presumably they were sold by William Fuller Maitland’s heirs. Fuller Maitland also owned at least two Blake drawings and the large colour print “Pity” now in the Metropolitan Museum. With the exception of Jerusalem (E), any or all of these Blakes may once have been in the Bliss collection.

The first commercial reproductions of Blake's Illuminated Printing were monochrome—reproducing the printed outlines but ignoring the hand-colouring added by William and Catherine Blake to most of their published work. The illustrations in Gilchrist's Life (1861) include those printed from electrotypes of Blake's original plates (for the Songs) and others copied by W.J. Linton, most of which are kerographs, a technique that Linton had invented. The enthusiasm for Blake's work encoouraged by Gilchrist led to the production of two monochrome volumes: Works by William Blake (London: Andrew Chatto, 1876) and Jerusalem (London: John Pearson, 1877). The success of the Pearson Jerusalem in particular would lead in due course to the facsimiles issued by William Muir from The Blake Press at Edmonton, where lithographed outlines were supplemented by hand colouring.

Bentley comments that publication of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1861, 2nd ed. 1880) not only multiplied the prices of his works, but it encouraged the production of facsimiles. "Of these, the most ambitious, and the most conspicuously successful, were those ... produced at The Blake Press at Edmonton by William Muir and his family and friends.  Twelve works in Illuminated Printing were issued between 1884 and 1890, printed and coloured by hand at great trouble and with considerable success.  These works have, on occasion, been accidentally sold as originals.  The size of the edition was small, but their influence was appreciable, and their scope has only been equalled in recent times by the facsimiles of the Blake Trust.”

In the 19th century a number of different methods of colour printing, notably chromoxylography (using separate woodblocks to print the colours), were employed that for the first time achieved widespread commercial success. George Baxter patented in 1835 a method using an intaglio line plate (or occasionally a lithograph), printed in black or a dark colour, and then overprinted with up to twenty different colours from woodblocks. The Baxter process ("Printed in Oil colours by G. Baxter, patentee") produced results far from Blake's delicate watercolour. Edmund Evans used relief and wood throughout, with up to eleven different colours, and latterly specialized in illustrations for children's books, using fewer blocks but overprinting non-solid areas of colour to achieve blended colors. Something like the Evans approach must have been used for the Blake illustrations of Swinburne's Critical Essay (1868) and (supplemented by hand-colouring) for the facsimile of the Marriage of Heaven & Hell issued by John Camden Hotten in 1868.

Chromolithography was another process, which by the end of the 19th century had become dominant. This used multiple prints with a lithographic stone, later a zinc plate, for each colour. Mechanical colour separation, initially using photographs of the image taken with three different colour filters, reduced the number of prints needed to three. The results of reproducing Blake's work by this process are on occasion uniquely horrible.

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Sources

G. E. Bentley, Jr.—Blake Books : Annotated Catalogues of William Blake's Writings …and Scholarly and Critical Works about him.—Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

G. E. Bentley, jr.—“Two Contemporary Facsimiles of Songs of Innocence and of Experience”.—Bibliographical Society of America.—Papers, LXIV (1970), 450-463.

Bamber Gascoigne.—How to identify prints:a complete guide to manual and mechanical processes from woodcut to inkjet.—2nd ed.—London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.

N. Katherine Hayles.—“Translating media: why we should rethink textuality”.—The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 16, no 2 (Fall 2003), 263.

Joseph Viscomi.—"Blake after Blake: A Nation Discovers Genius".—Blake, Nation, Empire; Steve Clark & David Worrall, eds.—London: Palgrave, 2005.