David V. Erdman Bücher

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 colored pages . . . like peeping into a furnace of light through a crack in the door".

Since it was first published in 1965, David V. Erdman's edition has been widely hailed as easily the best available text of Blake's poetry and prose. Comparing it to other Blake texts, Michale J. Tolley in Southern Review observed that it has "very much fuller textual annotations; and incorporates a remarkable number of new readings, including an almost complete recovery of the suppressed or altered passages in Jerusalem and many new readings of hitherto dubious passages in the manuscript, including many in The Four Zoas." F.W. Bateson, writing in The New York Review, pointed out that "the crucial preliminary problem [in establishing Blake's text] is simply to make out what Blake wrote -- including, of course, what he wrote before he deleted the manuscript or erased the engraving (or the copper-plate script). Erdman has used the modern aids such as infra-red photography, micro-photography and a powerful magnifying glass to help his own sharp and experienced eyes, but his real achievement has simply been to look at the physical realities of Blake's text more closely and intelligently than any previous editor."