The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake (Unabridged - With All The Original Illustrations)
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,Poetry
The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake (Unabridged - With All The Original Illustrations) Details
This carefully crafted ebook: "The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake (Unabridged - With All The Original Illustrations)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Taking his inspiration from the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages, Blake invented the process of creating Illuminated Books. Between 1788 and early 1795 Blake published a series of fifteen Illuminated Books. He returned to creating Illuminated Books in 1804 when he began work on Milton (finished in 1808 or later) and Jerusalem. Blake committed himself in the minute particulars of producing his Illuminated Books. The process included creating a mental image, drawing, composing the design and poetry of the plate, engraving, printing, painting, compiling and selling. From inception to final production the color copy of Jerusalem was labored over for sixteen years. William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.
Reviews
This is a review of the Kindle edition.Many years ago, I got the Dover pocket editions of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I was taken with the artwork but very grateful for the conventional printed text opposite each printed page. When I saw a Kindle edition of all Blake's illustrated works, I thought it would be wonderful to have them always with me. On the Kindle Fire, it is quite nice. The one drawback is that instead of the text facing the plates, it is printed in full after each work. For shorter works like All Religions are One or America: A Prophecy, this is workable. To have the full text of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience only after a display of all the plates is not so convenient.On the Kindle Paperwhite, the images are reasonably good and can be blown up reasonably well. It's okay for the works with larger text relative to page size like the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. For works where the printing is relatively smaller, like the Book of Urizen, the Kindle Paperwhite captures neither the artwork nor the printing in a very satisfying way.I'm going to assume that if you are looking at this, you are already aware of who Blake is and what he produced. This review is only of the presentation. If you have a Kindle Fire and love Blake, you will want to keep your printed copies but this is nice to have for a relatively good price. If you don't have a Kindle with a color screen, you're using a lot of memory for far less value.