William Blake: Complete Illuminated Books (Thames & Hudson 60th Anniversary Edition)

Thames & Hudson is celebrating it’s 60th Anniversary! To mark this special birthday we will be reissuing 20 titles from across our list as special editions. Popular when first published, popular now, with the added spice that – enhanced by their unique 60th Anniversary cover and jacket designs – they are set to become collectors items.

One of Thames & Hudson's landmark publications, this volume reproduces every page of Blake's dazzling illuminated books. In his 'illuminated' books, William Blake combined his handwritten text with his exuberant imagery on pages the like of which had not been seen since the great decorated books of the Middle Ages. To read such books as Jerusalem, America and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in cold letterpress bears no comparison to seeing and reading them as Blake conceived them, infused with his sublime and exhilarating colours. At times tiny figures and forms dance among the lines of the text, flames appear to burn up the page, and dense passages of Biblical-sounding text are brought to a jarring halt by startling images of death, destruction and liberation.

This edition, produced together with The William Blake Trust, contains all the pages of Blake,s twenty or so illuminated books reproduced in true size, an appendix with all Blake's text set in type and an introduction by the noted Blake scholar, David Bindman. They can at last become part of the lives of all lovers of art and poetry.