The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile.
1973. Oxford, 1973.
4to, xv, 105 pages. Numerous illustrations. Original blue cloth. Sticker inside from “London Borough of Camden Public Libraries - Reference Library,” and a sticker on the back inside, “Reference and Information Services. This book may not be removed from the library.” A few bent page corners. Very good.
§ Revised edition of the 1935 printing. See Bentley A123: “of major importance.” “What we now think of as Blake’s Notebook was probably begun by his younger brother Robert for sketching and then preserved by William after Robert’s early death in 1787. Used sporadically, first for sketches—among many others, the early illuminated book Songs of Experience, the emblem book Gates of Paradise, and later Jerusalem—and then for more and more poems and prose, from A Vision of the Last Judgment to a projected Public Address on the history and state of engraving to miscellaneous memoranda on his craft… He filled the book from front to back and then turned it around and filled it from the other direction” (The Blake Archive). After Blake’s death the book passed from Catherine Blake to William Palmer, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is now in the British Library. Item #107857
Price: $250.00