Jerusalem (First Folio Society Edition)

BLAKE, William (ed. Morton D. Paley). Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. London: The Folio Society in association with the William Blake Trust, 2007.

Large Quarto (31 × 22.5 cm). Quarter burgundy Morocco leather with shimmering blue-green moiré silk boards. Spine lettered in gilt. Top edge stained burgundy. 303 pp. 100 colour plates in facsimile throughout, reproducing all plates of Blake's illuminated printing, with five additional comparative plates from other known copies. 170-page transcription of the complete text, followed by extensive notes and commentary by the editor, bibliography, and corrigenda. Blue-grey pictorial slipcase with colour reproduction of Blake's title page to front. First Folio Society edition. Published in association with the William Blake Trust in the 250th anniversary year of William Blake's birth.

William Blake (1757–1827) engraved, printed, hand-coloured, and bound Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion between approximately 1804 and 1820, producing five complete copies of the one hundred illuminated plates in his lifetime. It is the longest and most ambitious of his prophetic books — a visionary epic running to one hundred plates in which the fall and redemption of Albion, Blake's symbolic figure for humanity in general and England in particular, is enacted across a mythological landscape populated by the giant beings he had been elaborating throughout his career. Los, the creative spirit, labours to awaken Albion from his sleep of error; the Spectre and the Emanation contend; and Jerusalem herself — city, woman, liberty — must be recovered before the eternal human form can be restored.

The poem is difficult in the way that all of Blake's prophetic works are difficult: it requires acquaintance with the private mythology he built across twenty years of writing, and it does not accommodate readers who approach it expecting conventional narrative or conventional allegory. It rewards sustained engagement with the quality that all great visionary poetry ultimately offers — the sense that the difficulty is not a barrier but the thing itself, the record of a mind working at the very edge of what language can hold. It is also, in its illuminated form, among the most spectacular visual productions in the history of English art: a work in which text and image are so completely integrated that to read one without seeing the other is to read something fundamentally different.

This Folio Society edition, produced in association with the William Blake Trust in the 250th anniversary year of Blake's birth, reproduces all one hundred plates in full colour facsimile, with five additional comparative plates from other surviving copies. Morton D. Paley — one of the foremost Blake scholars of his generation and a leading figure at the Blake Trust — edited the volume and provided the introduction, notes, and commentary. The 170-page transcription that follows the facsimile section translates Blake's engraved handwriting into legible type, making the complete text fully accessible without displacing the visual primacy of the illuminated plates.

Near fine. A few very small markings to leather; some shelf markings to slipcase. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000583