Night Thoughts (Folio Society Limited Edition)

YOUNG, Edward (illus. William Blake). Night Thoughts: The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality. London: The Folio Society, 2005. 3 vols.

Thick elephant folio. Two main volumes bound in quarter goatskin and illustrated cloth. Spines lettered in gilt. Cover illustration by Neil Gower. Contents printed on Natural Evolution paper by Castelli Bolis. Accompanied by envelope containing three loose prints. Companion commentary volume by Robyn Hamlyn. Vol. I & II: 548 pp. across two volumes; companion volume: [vi], xx, 362 pp. Housed in purple buckram solander case lettered in gilt. First Folio Society edition. First and only complete publication of Blake's watercolour illustrations for Night Thoughts. Limited to 750 numbered copies, this being number 484.

Edward Young's The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, published between 1742 and 1745, was one of the most widely read poems of the eighteenth century — a long meditation on mortality, grief, and the consolations of faith, written in the shadow of the deaths of his wife and stepdaughter. Its influence on the Romantic movement was substantial.

When William Blake undertook his illustrations for a projected edition in the 1790s, he produced over 500 watercolours. This produced a body of work of extraordinary ambition and visual intensity, among the most powerful he ever made. The published edition of 1797 reproduced only 43 of these as engravings; the project was a commercial failure, and the remaining watercolours remained unpublished, eventually passing to the British Museum where they have been held ever since.

This Folio Society facsimile of 2005 is the first and only time the complete series of watercolours has been reproduced in full colour and at full scale. The result is a publishing event of genuine art-historical significance: nearly 500 works by Blake, many of them little known even to specialists, presented for the first time as the complete visual accompaniment Young's poem was always intended to have. The accompanying commentary volume by Robyn Hamlyn, Blake specialist and former curator at Tate Britain, provides the scholarly apparatus appropriate to the material.

Near fine. Some very mild foxing to the cloth of Vol. II. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000154.

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