Remember Me! A New Years Gift or Christmas Present, 1826.
1825. London: I. Poole, [1825?].
12mo, frontispiece “A Tribute of Regard...”; title-page “Remember Me” etc. with 1826 beneath “Christmas Present”; second engraved leaf recto “Calendar and Album 1826...”, verso January and February, next three leaves with the rest of the Calendar; verso of third leaf “The Virgin Child and St. John”; 8 pp. of engraved music; contents and introduction [i] ii-xxiv; plate “Her screams aroused her servant”; [1] 2-336. With the Blake plate at p. 32, and color plates at 42, 73, 88, 89, 93, 148, 149, 275 (b/w The Storm), and 326 (color). Publisher’s original printed yellow paper boards, no backstrip, some foxing and marginal waterstains, but a good copy of this fragile booklet in its rarest format, preserved in a cloth box.
§ Second issue of the book (no variance in the plate, the contents omits the blank leaves and the misnumbered leaves at the end). One of the rarest of all of the plates designed and engraved by Blake, here in its rarest format. The plate, titled “The Hiding of Moses” was the last plate designed and engraved by Blake himself for a commercial publication; the original drawing “Moses placed in the Ark of Bulrushes,” which closely echoes a tempera now untraced that was executed some 25 years earlier, is in the Huntington Library. Bentley, BB, 490B. Easson and Essick, WBBI, Vol. I, XI (recording the Rosenwald proof and 3 copies). Keynes, Blake Studies, XIX (recording 7 variants but not mentioning the 1826 printing). Also see Bentley’s detailed essay and census of copies in “Remember Me! Customs and Costumes of Blake’s Gift Book,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 80.4 (fall 2011): 880-92. Item #110801
Price: $29,500.00