The Book of Thel.
1885. Edmonton: William Muir, 1885.
4to, 8 unnumbered hand-colored plates with no printed outline. Full red straight-grain morocco, covers panelled in gilt, backstrip gilt-lettered. A fine copy, bookplate of C.H. Wilkinson dated 1938.
§ The Muir facsimile (based on copy D in the British Museum) and limited to around 50 copies. The plates are delicately colored and the text is printed in golden-brown. Bentley, BB, 249b. Essick notes three versions of the ca. 1885 edition, one entirely executed by hand (this copy), another version with the correction of ‘sprin’ to ‘springs’ on leaf 5 line 7, and a third version with the final two leaves numbered 5 and 6 as in Blake’s original (the two prior versions do not have numbered leaves).
The Book of Thel is “the first, the simplest, and the most charming of the prophetic books... best understood as a rewriting of Milton’s Comus.” Bentley, BB, 26. It is known in about 20 different versions though some today are untraced. (The prophetic work Tiriel was written before the Book of Thel but was never printed by Blake.). Item #123176
Price: $4,500.00