William Blake’s Illuminated Printing

Joseph Viscomi *

If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.

—Blake, Prospectus, October 1793

On 12 April 1827, shortly before he died, Blake wrote to George Cumberland thanking him for trying to sell copies of Blake's illuminated books and his recently published engraved illustrations to the Book of Job. Blake had first executed the Job illustrations as watercolor drawings for Thomas Butts around 1805, followed by a duplicate set for John Linnell, who commissioned him to engrave the series in 1823.

Three years later, Blake had 22 line engravings that looked very different from the tonal prints then popular. Indeed, they even looked different from engravings, his own included, for they were not executed in the standard “mixed method” technique, in which designs were first etched and then finished as engravings. In this technique, which Blake mastered as an apprentice, the design’s outline was traced with a needle through an acid-resistant “ground” covering the copper plate and then etched with acid. The engraver went over these slightly incised lines with burins (metal tools with square or lozenge-shaped tips used to cut lines into the plate) and engraved the plate's entire surface, uniting all parts in a web of crosshatched lines. These advances in technique (Fig. 1) enabled “modern” engravers to represent mass and tone more convincingly than the more linear style of such “ancient” engravers as Blake’s heroes, Durer and Raimondi, whose works were often dismissed as “Hard Stiff & Dry Unfinishd Works of Art” (anno. Reynolds, E 639). The Job engravings were executed entirely with burins and without preliminary etching, with tone subordinate to line and texture and with lines amassed in parallel strokes rather than in the conventional "dot and lozenge" pattern (dots incised in the interstices of crosshatched lines, the linear system characteristic of bank-note engraving). Blake's emulation of the ancient engravers produced a modern result: original artistic expression in a graphic medium whose materiality and natural language were fully exploited. It was the masterpiece of his lifetime as an engraver, but it would be a tough sell, as Blake and Linnell, who had 315 sets printed in early 1826, must both have realized. [1]

Works that Blake had in stock were not selling well. Even if the illuminated books might do better, as Cumberland supposed, the prospect of printing new copies did not excite their maker:

… having none remaining of all that I had Printed I cannot Print more Except at a great loss for at the time I printed those things I had a whole House to range in now I am shut up in a Corner therefore am forced to ask a Price for them that I scarce expect to get from a Stranger. I am now Printing a Set of the Songs of Innocence & Experience for a Friend at Ten Guineas which I cannot do under Six Months consistent with my other Work, so that I have little hope of doing any more of such things. the Last Work I produced is a Poem Entitled Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, but find that to Print it will Cost my Time the amount of Twenty Guineas One I have Finishd It contains 100 Plates but it is not likely that I shall get a Customer for it (letter of 12 April 1827, E 783-84)

Though dubious about their prospects, Blake listed six books he was willing to reprint—at about twenty times the prices advertised in his 1793 Prospectus (E 693).

Producing new copies of any illuminated book had become far more labor intensive, with each illuminated page now printed on one side of the leaf and elaborately colored, framed with lines, and often touched with gold leaf. Impressions now looked more like miniature paintings, a far cry from those produced in the 1790s, when plates were usually printed on both sides of the paper and lightly colored to look more like pages than prints or paintings. But six months?

Blake's “Corner” was two fair-sized rooms in the Strand—much less space than the “eight or ten rooms” (BR 560) in Lambeth, where from 1790 to 1800 he had written, designed, etched, printed, and colored The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy, For Children: The Gates of Paradise (all 1793), Europe a Prophecy, Songs of Experience, the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The First Book of Urizen (all 1794), The Book of Los, The Song of Los, and The Book of Ahania (all 1795), and where he also reprinted copies of his earlier works, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion (1788), Songs of Innocence (1789), and The Book of Thel (1789-90). By 1795, Blake had produced over 125 copies of the 168 surviving copies of illuminated books. [2]

Clearly, six months was a lot of time to devote to an illuminated book. Of the 111 engravings that Blake had produced between 1789 and 1795, he had executed 80 between 1790 and 1793, which suggests that he concentrated on illuminated printing during 1789-90 and 1793-95, intervals that correspond exactly with the books’ dates, and that he underwrote the cost of his original productions with his commercial work. From one medium-sized engraving, Blake could earn £15-30 (E 703) or as much as £80 (BR 569). Had he sold his entire stock of illuminated books at their initial prices, he would have made less than £50, barely enough to pay for the copper and paper, let alone his labor. [3] By 1795, with a stock of illuminated books, he began to redirect his considerable energies toward other projects. These included 12 large color-print drawings, 537 watercolor illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, 43 of which he engraved, 117 illustrations to Gray’s Poems, the Four Zoas manuscript, and a series of tempera paintings for Butts. The 1790s were his most successful period financially, not from the sale of illuminated books but from the steady employment by the book and print publishers and his patron. After the intense early periods of illuminated printing, the books never again commanded center stage in his life; even the 150 plates of the major prophecies Milton (c. 1811) and Jerusalem (c. 1820) were written and etched over many years consistent with his “other Work.”

In 1800 the Blakes left London to spend three years in Felpham. On their return they took a first-floor apartment in South Molton Street. Their living quarters became smaller with each move, more suitable for engraving and painting than printing. At Felpham, Blake may have printed a few separate copies of Innocence and Experience; at South Molton Street, he wrote and printed Milton and Jerusalem, probably revised For Children, and reprinted nine other illuminated books—about 29 copies altogether. These were the years of Blake’s 1809 exhibition, illustrations to Blair's Grave, illustrations to Milton, most of the Bible illustrations, and the Canterbury Pilgrims engraving. By contrast, when Cumberland wrote him at Fountain Court, he had etched only three illuminated plates, for On Homers Poetry (c. 1822) and The Ghost of Abel (1822), and had printed only four copies of Songs (copies W and Y in 1825, Z and AA in 1826). But, as implied in his letter to Cumberland, he remained as busy as ever.

Blake had been illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy for over two years. When he wrote Cumberland, he had 102 designs and was engraving 7 of them. As he told Linnell, “I am too much attachd to Dante to think much of any thing else—I have Proved the Six Plates & reduced the Fighting Devils ready for the Copper I count myself sufficiently Paid If I live as I now do” (letter of 25 April 1827, E 784). The other work was a copy of Marriage (I) and one of Songs (X), the “Set of the Songs” he was “now Printing.” Both were highly finished in gold, watercolors, and pen and ink. His very last book, though, was uncolored copy F of Jerusalem, a commission secured by Linnell a few weeks after he wrote Cumberland. Its “100 Plates” did not, however, sell for “Twenty Guineas"; Blake completed it on his deathbed, and its £5 5 shillings sale price helped to pay for his burial. [4]

Three books in six months. Printing illuminated books was still possible, but more difficult than before because they demanded greater artistic attention, disrupted other work, and required more space. The place they occupied in Blake’s life had changed. How different things had been with “a whole House to range in,” where he could spread out and move through the stages of illuminated printing, from preparing plates and designing pages, to etching and printing designs, to coloring and collating impressions, as though moving through the six days of creation—or the six "chambers" of the “Printing house in Hell” (MHH 15, E 40).

In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a caves mouth;
within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave.

Fifteen of Blake’s 19 illuminated works were executed in a relief-etching technique he had invented in 1788. In his prospectus of 1793 he called it “Illuminated Printing" and announced that he had “invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense”; he defined it as “a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet” (Prospectus, E 692-93). Though he never explained the technique, he did describe his “infernal method” as “melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (MHH 14, E 39). In “a Printing house in Hell,” he “saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation,” and allegorized its major stages as fantastic acts in six "chambers," where a “cave,” symbolizing the copper plate, was made “infinite” and “cast” into the “expanse” (MHH 15, E 40).

In practice, Blake wrote texts and drew illustrations with pens and brushes on copper plates in acid-resistant ink and, with nitric acid, etched away the unprotected metal to bring the composite design into printable relief. He printed the plates in colored inks on a rolling press and tinted most impressions in watercolors. While the combination of word and image is a prominent feature of illuminated printing, it appears not to have been the impetus for the invention. He credited the method to a vision of his recently deceased brother Robert, and first used it for The Approach of Doom, [5] a print in imitation of Robert's wash drawing. The first works to incorporate text were All Religions are One and No Natural Religion, small philosophical tractates on perception and the “Poetic Genius.” The following year he used the technique to publish poetry, beginning with Innocence and Thel.

Illuminated printing was not mysterious, complex, or difficult. The pens, brushes, and liquid medium enabled Blake to design directly on copper plates as though he were drawing on paper, which in turn encouraged him to integrate text and illustration on the same page. Technically, such integration was possible in conventional (intaglio) etching (as in Ahania), but the economics of publishing had long defined etching as image reproduction and letterpress as text reproduction, so that the conventional illustrated book was the product of much divided labor, with illustrations produced and printed in one medium and shop and separately inserted into leaves printed elsewhere in letterpress on a different kind of press. Even when words and images were brought together on the same leaf, divisions in production were maintained.

Whether Blake used relief or intaglio, as author illustrating and printing himself, he would have united the various stages of book production, obtaining control over the production of his illustrated text the same way he did as a graphic artist over his own images. The tools of drawing and sketching, though, freed him to think in new ways, to unite invention and execution in ways defeated by conventional printmaking. Moreover, the idea that an artist’s first and spontaneous thoughts are most valuable because they are closest to the original creative spark, often obliterated by high finishing, had become very popular in the late eighteenth century, creating a taste for drawings and sketches and motivating printmakers to invent techniques to reproduce them in facsimile and to simulate their various textures (e.g., chalk, crayon, pen and wash). Such prints, however, were carefully executed with needles, roulettes (a textured wheel used to roughen the plate’s surface to produce tonalities), and other metal tools, their spontaneity a crafted illusion. Blake, on the other hand, by actually using the tools and techniques of writing and drawing, had solved the technical problem of reproducing pen and brush marks in metal. He created a multi-media site where poetry, painting, and printmaking came together in ways both original and characteristic of Romanticism’s fascination with spontaneity and the idea of the sketch. [6]

No printmaker before Blake had incorporated the tools and techniques of writing, drawing, and painting in a graphic medium, though the materials and tools were commonplace. The varnishes, acid, inks, dabbers, brushes, quills, oils, colors, and paper were in every engraver’s workshop—along with the main ingredient, the copper plate. Plates were purchased from coppersmiths, usually cut to size. Because intaglio etchings and engravings had to be printed with pressure great enough to force paper into the incised lines, which resulted in a "platemark" or embossment that revealed the plate’s shape, engravers neatly squared the plate and bevelled the sides to prevent them from cutting the paper. For relief etching, Blake cut small plates out of larger sheets himself, cutting them roughly equal size but not uniformly, using either a hammer and chisel or scoring the sheet deeply with a burin and snapping it between boards. Because he printed from raised surfaces rather than incised lines, he used less pressure and avoided pronounced platemarks, and consequently he dispersed with squaring and bevelling. Equally unorthodox, he etched both sides of plates (for example, Experience, Europe, and Urizen were etched on the backs of Innocence, America, and Marriage plates). Cutting the cost of copper, his most expensive material, the “verso” books were the only ones to turn a profit at the time. [7]

Blake prepared plates for relief etching as he did for intaglio etching. He planed plates on an anvil with a hammer (the tools of Los in Blake’s mythology), and then, with water, oil, and various grinding stones, polished the surface to a mirror-like finish. Polishing made plates easier to cut with burins or needles and easier to wipe clean of ink, but it deposited a greasy film that had to be removed, otherwise either the etching ground or Blake's "ink" would have adhered to the film rather than metal and could have flaked from the plate in the acid bath. Because relief etchings required a long bite in strong acid, thorough and correct “degreasing” with chalk or breadcrumbs—“clearing away the rubbish—was of the utmost importance.

In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave,
and others adorning it with gold, silver and precious stones

In intaglio etching, Blake melted a ball of ground consisting of wax and resins and spread it over a warm degreased plate. He smoked the ground to darken and harden it, transferred the design onto it, and cut through the design with a needle (Fig. 2). The metal thus exposed was bitten below the surface with acid. In relief etching, though, he drew the design directly on a clean copper plate with pens and brushes using a liquid medium. Like the etching ground, this medium had to be acid-resistant but it also had to flow easily, adhere when dry, not spread or blot on the plate, and be usable with pens and brushes. In short, it had to behave like writing ink. Linnell identified Blake's “impervious liquid” (BR 460n.1) as being the usual "stop-out" varnish that etchers used to paint over lines sufficiently etched to “stop” the acid from biting them deeper (Fig. 3). By stopping out lines and biting plates in successive stages, etchers varied the depth and width of lines—much as engravers did by cutting them deeper with their diamond-shaped burins. Varying the amount of ink that lines held altered their tone, making possible the modeling of forms and the illusion of aerial perspective.

Blake did not invent his writing medium; he merely adapted one of the brown asphaltum-based stop-out varnishes. With plate, acid-resistant “ink,” pens, and brushes, he entered the second chamber and, like "a Viper folding round the rock & the cave," he rewrote his text, first drafted on paper, and illustrated it in a sinuous, calligraphic hand. By cutting into broad areas painted in stop-out, he created fine white and black parallel lines (Fig. 4); by cutting the nib of his quill, he varied the strokes of his letters.

Because the printed image mirrors the plate image, Blake rewrote his text backwards, an “art” his friends acknowledged he “excel[led] in” (BR 212n.1)—and which he pictures himself doing in Jerusalem plate 37. He usually started with text and illustrated around it, visually composing the page design while executing it (Fig. 5). How different this was from the way he worked as an etcher and engraver—from all etchers and engravers—even when executing original designs. Their methods and objectives prevented designing directly in the metal; the image they reproduced was first worked up on paper and then transferred to the plate as a guide for the needle. Likewise, the engraver needed the lightly etched outline because the burin cuts rather than draws lines, translating them into three-dimensional lines of varying depth and width. But the methods used by engravers to transfer designs did not work in relief etching, and there was no technical need for Blake to transfer the page design or any of its parts, since he was engaged neither in cutting it into the plate nor in translating it into different kinds of lines. The tools and Blake’s twenty years of drawing experience enabled him to design his pages as he rewrote his texts on the plates, as though creating an illuminated manuscript.

No illuminated designs that might have been transferred or even redrawn are extant, nor are there any mockups of designs except for two roughly composed, textless pencil sketches for Thel plates 6 and 7, and both differ considerably from the printed designs. Blake realized very early that his new medium's autographic nature made the poem the only prerequisite for executing plates, that rewriting texts was also an act of visual invention, and thus that the medium could be used for production rather than reproduction. With no designs to transfer or reproduce, the placement and extent of text, letter size, line spacing, as well as placement and extent of illustration, were invented only during execution. [8] This method of designing meant that Blake did not know which lines or stanzas would go on which plate, or how many plates a poem/book would need. Working without models allowed each illuminated print and book to evolve through its production in ways impossible in conventional book-making. Blake could begin working on a book before it was completely written. [9]

While writing backwards was not difficult, mastering the “ink” and giving small letters the proper slant were, at least initially. Blake could dip brushes directly in the ink, but probably loaded the quill pens used for text with a small brush, a method illuminators used to keep quills from clogging. And like illuminators of manuscripts, he may have slanted his plates to keep his quill as horizontal as possible. Blake could write texts in roman or italic lettering—he used both in No Natural Religion—but he quickly favored the latter, which was easier to write and, with fewer letter ends to coordinate, to keep straight and uniform. Italic script also facilitated the next stage: with fewer letter ends exposed to acid, words were better protected against problems caused by the acid pitting and lifting the ground. Tight designs also exemplified Blake’s thinking in terms of his medium: to be printable, they do not need to be bitten as deeply as designs with open spaces, and thus require less time in acid. Their dense line systems also facilitated inking by keeping the ink dabber on the surface and clear of the "shallows," the areas bitten below the surface meant to print white.

In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air, he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite, around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs.

Blake had to etch accurately to retain the autographic quality of his designs. The acid—or “aquafortis”—commonly employed in his day was diluted nitric. Acid is unpredictable, affected by age, temperature, humidity, and the metal’s purity—especially in relief etching, because the large amount of exposed metal heats it and makes it bite more viciously. Such “corrosives” may be “salutary and medicinal . . . in Hell” (MHH 14, E 39), but on earth they emit noxious orange fumes and require good ventilation. Blake embedded the plate’s edges in strips of wax to create a self-contained tray and poured the acid about a quarter inch deep. He watched it turn blue and gas bubbles form along the design—more bubbles than he had ever seen before, signs of trouble. He passed a feather—the conventional tool to agitate the acid—over the design (Fig. 6), doing so every few minutes as bubbles began to reform, to keep the acid from undercutting or lifting the design: “an Eagle with wings and feathers of air . . . caused the inside of the cave to be infinite.” Looking down on the flat, dark-brown design on reddish copper in its cloudy blue-tinted bath, he was like Rintrah, shaking “his fires in the burdend air,” watching “hungry clouds swag on the deep” (MHH 2, E 33). Indeed, he was the Spirit of God that "was upon the face of the deep . . . divid[ing] the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:1-4).

Hours, not days, later, unetched surfaces were divided from shallows and a relief plate was created. Like a god brooding over creation—pictured on Marriage plate 14—Blake was “Melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (E 39). Displayed, of course, was the composite design now visible in relief, metaphorically materialized as “immense cliffs” large enough to house “palaces” built by “Eagle like men,” assistants in the "image" and "likeness" of the Eagle, as signs of their “dominion” (Gen. 1:26). The cliffs and valleys of this small copper plate were indeed a minute particular manifesting Creation itself.

Under the watchful eyes of Blake or his trusted “devil,” or printer’s assistant, his wife Catherine, etching could take much of the day; no doubt a few plates were etched at the same time—but not in one long continuous bite of the acid. In intaglio etching, Blake stopped out selected areas and etched the plate in successive stages to vary line depth and tone. But relief lines are all on the same level and thus receive equal amounts of ink; like woodcuts, they are essentially two-dimensional, boldly contrasting black and white forms incapable of producing tonal gradation. Nevertheless, Blake stopped out his plates at least once. (A two-stage etch is indicated by steps around the relief plateaus of Blake’s only surviving relief-etched copperplate, a fragment from a rejected America plate.) After 45 to 90 minutes of etching, his design was in slight relief. He poured off the acid, dried the plate, and then carefully painted over words with stop out to protect details from lifting during a longer second bite, which was necessary to deepen the areas around words and lines. Only if the "ink" started to lift would there be additional stopping out.

A long day, but at the end, a printable image was created many times more quickly than by engraving, where a square inch of close cross-hatching could take a full day or more.

In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids.

After etching the design into printable relief, pouring off the acid, and removing the wax walls, Blake erased the "ink" with turpentine and polished the plate. He was now ready to make printing ink.

Ink for relief and intaglio printing was made by grinding powdered pigment with different grades of burnt walnut or linseed oil. Intaglio ink is tackier and stiffer than relief because it must stay in incised lines when the plate’s surface is wiped clean and requires more pressure to transfer evenly. Nevertheless, Blake used it to print relief plates, as is evinced by the slightly reticulated surfaces of his prints, especially noticeable in solid areas. He inked plates on the intaglio printer’s conventional charcoal brazier, whose low heat made stiff ink thinner and more fluid and thus easier to manipulate and spread (Fig. 7). Like a “Lion[] of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids,” he spread glistening, warm ink with a linen dabber, moving its slightly convex bottom across the plate's surface and off the shallows. Plates with wide shallows he inked locally with small dabbers or brushes. Even so, inking relief plates was quicker than intaglio plates, which required a two-step process of rubbing ink into the lines and wiping the surface clean with rags and the palm of the hand.

Blake wiped the ink from any relief surfaces he did not wish to print. He routinely wiped the thin line bordering the plate created by the wax dike used to hold the acid (Fig. 8). The borders formed part of the plate’s relief line system and acted as runners for the dabber. Wiping them was similar to wiping the bevelled edges of intaglio plates to prevent them from blemishing the platemark. The result, however, was very different. Platemarks, clean or not, always reveal a plate’s shape and hence the image’s origin and medium. Because relief etchings produce no pronounced platemark, wiping the borders erased overt signs of the graphic medium. The unframed text and image looked written and drawn rather than printed, a unique rather than a repeatable image, an illusion further enhanced by colored inks and watercolor finishing.

The books were "Printed in Colours" (Prospectus, E 693). The first printing of Thel, for example, yielded thirteen (surviving) copies in five different colors. Changing inks during a print run diversified stock but also required more time, but it was not as labor intensive as color printing, in which a few thick opaque colors were applied to the plate’s surfaces and shallows, sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly, and printed with the inked design. Blake had adapted the á la poupée technique English printers used for color printing, and used it for nearly everything he printed in 1794-95. [10] In effect, he painted plates with small dabbers (poupées) to produce opaque colors and textures resembling oil sketches, which he enriched and finished in watercolors and pen and ink. In 1795, he brilliantly extended color printing more fully into painting, executing "12 Large Prints . . . Printed in Colours . . . unaccompanied by any writing." He rarely used the technique for books after that, though in 1796 he created the Large and Small Books of Designs for, appropriately enough, a miniaturist painter, by color printing a "selection" of plates "from the different Books of such as could be Printed without the Writing" (letter of 9 June 1818, E 771).

In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metals into the expanse.

From the inking station, Blake went to the press, where he again met Mrs. Blake, his printing “devil.” Simultaneously the dirtiest and cleanest of arts, involving oily inks and pristine paper, printing was best performed by two people. Printers, though, went unnamed in inscriptions on reproductive prints, which recorded date, title, artist, publisher, and engraver. Blake signed most illuminated works “Author & Printer W. Blake” or "Printed by W. Blake," taking pride in his manual as well as mental labor. The fifth chamber’s unpictureable image also puns on “form,” which is typeset into pages in a metal frame for printing. "Cast," another printing pun, refers to a stereotype (a solid body of type), as well as to the mold in which molten metals are poured; here, the mold shaping the “living . . . metals” is the “expanse” of blank sheets of paper, which now embody the relief plate’s immense cliffs, valleys, and palaces.

Blake printed on “the most beautiful wove paper that could be procured” (Prospectus, E 693)—the kind used by engravers. And he prepared it as a printmaker rather than a book printer, tearing large sheets of paper into quarters, eights, or twelves, instead of printing the sheet and then folding it into pages. Depending on the size of the sheet and how he cut it, the resulting leaves were basically big, medium, and small, or, according to Blake, “folio,” “quarto,” and “octavo,” because they roughly corresponded with those standard book sizes (he advertised Songs, for example, as “octavo”). Like all intaglio and relief printers of the day, he dampened the paper for printing.

Blake had taught his wife how to print, draw, and color, and was especially proud of her printing abilities. She proofed and printed both his relief and intaglio plates (BR 459). For relief plates, they decreased the pressure on their rolling press (a machine with two large cylinders between which a board passes when the top cylinder is turned) by slightly raising the roller and probably removing one of three felt blankets placed between plate and roller. Blake laid the inked plate on the bed of the press, face up. Mrs. Blake held top and bottom of a damp sheet of paper and lowered it onto the plate, being careful not to let it sag in the middle and touch the ink, or to move it once it touched the plate, otherwise some lines would print double or slightly out of focus. She covered the leaf registered to the plate with a backing sheet and blankets and turned the press’s handle to pull the bed smoothly between two heavy rollers (see Fig. 7). After the “marriage” of inked plate and paper, she removed the printed impression to dry and brought another leaf to the press as Blake brought another plate, returning the printed plate to the brazier to be reinked.

Printing impressions without pronounced platemarks meant Blake could print on both sides of leaves to create facing pages. This conventional book format used less paper, which was Blake’s largest expense other than metal, but could present difficulties. Mrs. Blake registered the clean side of the paper just printed onto the newly inked plate, and covered the printed side with a stiff backing sheet or thin metal plate (which she could wipe of offset ink and reuse). Offset was minimal, as in letterpress printing, because the ink was slightly pressed into the paper, and thus below the surface. Alternatively, Blake could print a stack of leaves and then print the versos (kept damp) once the ink was dry to the touch. In 1794, Blake began routinely printing on only one side of the paper, which, though easier, changed the dynamic between book and reader: with no competing image, the solo design dominated the page spread, demanding full attention and, in this format, came to demand more of Blake as it became increasingly more painterly.

By alternating plates, the Blakes kept the press in action and could efficiently print a dozen impressions in an hour. Printing eleven copies of an eleven-plate book like Visions (121 impressions) would take less than two full days. Normally, they printed one plate at a time, but for small plates, such as Songs, they could print two, each onto a separate leaf, halving their printing time. Registration of paper to plate was sometimes off, resulting in designs hanging low or high, slanted left or right. Blake did not mind; he appears to have rarely discarded impressions, since the quality of inking, printing, and registration varies within copies of books. Creating pages with uniform margins was impossible with plates only roughly equal in size, and given how they were cut, it is not likely that Blake was very exacting about registration. He did not abhor accidents, but saw them as part of the creative process, as revealing the maker’s hand and production process.

Hell’s "Printing house” has no chamber explicitly designated for coloring impressions. The infernal printmakers, however, incorporated ornamentation and color into the second and fourth chambers: the brushes illustrating text were also “adorning it with gold, silver, and precious stones,” and the “living fluids” of colored inks were inherently illuminating. Blake’s 1793 prospectus does not explicitly state that impressions were hand colored, only that they were “Printed in Colours.” But “illuminated” implies coloring, specifically of manuscripts, and “a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet” implies the same.

As with quills, inks, and varnishes, Blake made his own watercolors. He ground many of the same pigments used to make ink in water and gum arabic instead of oil, and, to make the thicker, more opaque colors, in a thin carpenter’s glue, diluting the paste with water to vary the paint layer’s consistency. In the early days, when he printed in earth tones (yellow ochre and raw sienna mostly), he applied broad, delicate washes in only a few colors, and usually left texts unwashed. He printed late works in red and orange inks, bright colors that invited a more extensive palette and elaborate coloring. He applied colors in thin washes and translucent layers with detailed brushwork, adding blues, pinks, or yellows behind text and often outlining texts and illustrations in pen and ink (Fig. 9). The result was a beautiful, strongly linear miniature, with legibility sometimes compromised.

He and his wife shared the task of illuminating the prints, at least in the first productions, perhaps adapting the method print publishers used when coloring prints, with each colorist using one or two colors and then passing the impression to the next colorist to add another color or two. For some books, Blake may have finished an impression from each stack of pages as a model, but neither he nor Mrs. Blake copied the other exactly. Making each impression exactly repeatable (as one would expect of books and prints) was not really possible when working by hand with an assistant. While each copy produced was a unique work of art, most impressions printed and colored at the same time do not differ very much; they share printing style, colors, coloring style, and even placement of colors. Making each impression very different would have required more labor and time, and, given the objective of producing multiple copies of books "at less than one fourth of the expense," would have been inefficient. Books printed in different periods, though, were also printed and colored in different styles and are visually very different. Overt differences among copies, in other words, usually reveal different periods and styles of production and not revision of the particular work.

There they were reciev’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries.

The sixth chamber conflates two actions, collating leaves to form copies of books and distributing them. It also implicitly questions the reception—and perception—of the book.

Like other book publishers of the day, the Blakes knew purchasers would have their books professionally bound. They merely fastened the leaves between two sheets of laid paper by tying string through three or more stab holes. (They varied the plate order for many of the early books, most notably for Songs and Urizen.). And like the publishers, they warehoused or “arranged” their copies in the printing house. But the "sixth chamber" is also outside the printing house, in "the expanse" into which the metals were "cast." The "expanse" is, ironically, the private space defined by the blank paper in the studio, but it is also the public space occupied by that paper as it moves from production to reception. After its gloriously sublime journey, touched by "Dragons," "Vipers," "Eagles," "Lions," "Unnamd forms," and now "Men," the illuminated print shelved in a library seems anticlimactic. But is it? As a "cast" of the original plate, it extends Hell's Printing house to the place of reading. Do the “fires of hell . . . look like torment and insanity” or “an immense world of delight”? Is the reader an “Angel . . . whose works are only Analytics," or an "Angel, who is now become a Devil,” reading in the “infernal or diabolical sense” (MHH 6, 7, 20, 24, E 35, 42, 44)? Does the reader participate in or resist the creative process embodied in the book?

In 1795, Blake produced a deluxe set of the books on large paper, possibly to display at the shop of his friend and sometimes employer, the publisher Joseph Johnson. Blake had by this time printed and colored with Mrs. Blake about 125 copies of his illuminated books in small editions very much on his own terms: "No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked, for none are wanted; but the Author will produce his works, and offer them to sale at a fair price" (Prospectus, E 693). Except for Songs, most copies of illuminated books executed by 1795 were also printed by 1795: fourteen of the sixteen extant copies of Thel; seven of the nine copies of Marriage; fourteen of seventeen copies of Visions, twelve of fourteen copies of America; eight of the nine copies of Europe; seven of the eight copies of Urizen; unique copies of The Book of Los and Ahania, and the six copies of The Song of Los.

For years he relied on stock, which, for Songs, his most popular work, lasted till around 1802, when he reprinted a few copies of Innocence and Experience, adding a few more in 1804 or 1805. One from the latter printing (Q) he sold to the Rev. Joseph Thomas, who paid “ten guineas” (£10 10 shillings)—the price Blake feared in 1827 he could “scarce expect to get from a Stranger"—as a way of giving this proud artist a monetary gift. This was far more than Blake had ever received for an illuminated book, and “for such a sum” he “could hardly do enough, finishing the plates like miniatures.” [11] Indeed, Blake’s “fair price” for the Songs was originally 6 shillings, 6 pence (Prospectus, E 693). Initially, all his books were sold in shillings, not pounds, priced as poetry rather than as colored prints or small paintings. The following year, in 1806, when Butts requested a copy, Blake's stock of Songs was again depleted, so he created copy E by salvaging poorly printed impressions from various 1789, 1794, and 1795 printings of Innocence and Experience still in the studio, recoloring them and strengthening text and designs in pen and ink. A lot of work but easier than making ink and colors, preparing paper and press, inking plates and printing, which were not worth doing for just one copy of one book—or, at that time, even for a complete set of books.

In December 1808, Cumberland wrote on behalf of a friend who “was so charmed” with Blake’s “incomparable etchings . . . that he requested . . . a compleat Set of all you have published in the way of Books coloured as mine are.” If none were “to be had,” he was “willing to wait your own time in order to have them as those of mine are” (BR 211). Blake refused this generous offer, fearing to disrupt his “present course” of “Designing & Painting”:

I am very much obliged by your kind ardour in my cause & should immediately Engage in reviving my former pursuits of printing if I had not now so long been turned out of the old channel into a new one that it is impossible for me to return to it without destroying my present course New Vanities or rather new pleasures occupy my thoughts New profits seem to arise before me so tempting that I have already involved myself in engagements that preclude all possibility of promising any thing . . . my time . . . in future must alone be devoted to Designing & Painting. (letter of 19 December 1808, E 769-70)

Blake was working on his 1809 exhibition, which netted a scurrilous review but no profits. For the next decade, with his stock of books depleted, Blake continued to work primarily as a painter and engraver, executing temperas (what he called “fresco”), illustrating Milton’s major poems, and engraving designs after Flaxman. He finished his Milton, printing three copies about 1811, and he continued to etch plates for Jerusalem— though, according to Cumberland, he had already etched “60 Plates of a new Prophecy” by summer 1807 (BR 187).

Only fourteen copies of four books (Innocence, Experience, America, and Milton) were produced between c. 1796 and 1818, which means that most illuminated books lay untouched for over twenty years. Blake did not replenish his stock until around 1818, motivated possibly by Linnell, whom he met that summer, and/or an inquiry about the books from Dawson Turner. He sent Turner a list of eight books (Innocence and Experience were still listed separately) and "12 Large Prints" that he was willing to reprint and their prices, telling him "that any Person wishing to have any or all of them should send me their Order to Print them on the above terms & I will take care that they shall be done at least as well as any I have yet Produced" (letter of 9 June 1818, E 771). For the first time since 1795, he printed copies of Thel (N, O), Marriage (G), Visions (N, O, P), and Urizen (G), along with Milton (D) and Songs (U, T), all in the same orange-red ink, paper, and coloring style. Of these, only Marriage, which he did not include in the list for Turner, and Songs would he print again. [12] Nor did he list Jerusalem, which was still in progress and not printed till c. 1820, in three copies in black ink, one of which Linnell purchased. He did list America and Europe, but did not print them till 1821, when he produced matching copies (O and K, respectively) for Linnell and began printing and coloring Jerusalem copy E in the same style.

The books he offered to Cumberland in 1827 were the same as those he had offered Turner (minus Milton and with Innocence and Experience combined), and the prices were £1-2 higher. Though nothing on the list was printed, he was—"consistent with [his] other Work"—printing copies of Songs and Marriage (again, conspicuously missing from his list), and ended his days printing a copy of Jerusalem. When he said he had "none remaining of all that [he] had Printed," he meant it. He had even sold his personal copies: Songs copy R (the model for the plate order of the last seven copies), printed c. 1795, to Linnell in 1819, for £1 19sh. 6d. (more than £4 less than he asked Turner for Songs) and Marriage copy H, printed in 1790, to Linnell in 1821, for £2 2sh. (less than half the then price of Urizen—which was etched on its versos). As with Songs copy E, he reworked both books before selling them. For Songs copy R, he added wide frames around each image and strengthened the coloring. For Marriage copy H, initially uncolored but printed in various red, olive, and green inks on both sides of the leaves, Blake elaborately colored the pages, adding gold leaf and, most unusually, going over the texts in various colored inks, word by word.

When he died, Blake had the only complete colored copy of Jerusalem (E), which he feared would not find "a Customer," and Songs copy W. His wife inherited both but could sell only the Songs. All of Blake's illuminated plates, prints, drawings, and manuscripts ended up in the hands of Frederick Tatham, one of the young artists who gathered around Blake in the last years of his life. In the 1830s, Tatham printed uncolored copies of Songs, America, Europe, and Jerusalem from Blake's plates. The plates disappeared while in Tatham's possession, reputedly sold for scrap metal (BR 417n.3).

From the perspective of book publishing, Blake's illuminated books were produced as fine “limited editions.” They were not invented to secure financial independence, and they didn’t. And though Blake stated that his method cut production costs (primarily by his not paying for labor, manuscript, or design), it was a labor intensive, and not cost effective, means of production, mostly underwritten by his commercial work. Printing relief-etched plates was not difficult, but it was slow compared to printing books in the standard way. Considering how few copies Blake could produce during the “run,” we can see why he felt that he was “never . . . able to produce a Sufficient number for a general Sale by means of a regular Publisher,” and why the books proved “unprofitable enough to [him] tho Expensive to the Buyer.” But from the perspective of an artist accustomed to producing unique works, illuminated books provided with wider audiences and greater opportunities to make his reputation, as he admitted to Turner: “The Few I have Printed & Sold are sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an Artist which was the chief thing Intended." He also insisted, though, referring to the Large and Small Books of Designs, that printing illuminated plates “without the Writing” was at “the Loss of some of the best things For they when Printed perfect accompany Poetical Personifications & Acts without which Poems they never could have been Executed" (letter of 9 June 1818, E 771).

Looking back from the last year of his life, Blake could see the great contrast between his early and late illuminated books. The first six years of production progressed through a series of three formats: leaves printed on both sides and lightly washed (1789-93), color printing (1794-95), and single-sided printing with borders and richer coloring (c. 1795). After 1795, the format remained the same, though the coloring style continued to become more elaborate. Late practice differed from early in that far fewer copies per book were produced, various titles were produced in the same session, and printing sessions appear to have been motivated by at least one commission, which made printing other titles viable. Late copies cost far more than early ones. The dramatic increase in price reflects a change in Blake’s idea of the book—from books of poems to series of hand-colored prints, from prints as pages to prints as paintings. The latter demanded more from him and the reader, but, early or late, his books always had the power to illuminate, to open eyes and convert “angels” into “devils.” The apocalyptic role of his “infernal method” was always clear: “The whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy . . . by an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (MHH 14, E 39)—and with that, “the Author is sure of his reward” (Prospectus, E 692).

William Blake’s Illuminated Printing

Joseph Viscomi *

FURTHER READING

NOTES