William Blake (Thames & Hudson Ltd)

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 coloured pages...like peeping into a furnace of light through a crack in the door'.