Songs of Innocence and of Experience (The Illuminated Books of William Blake, Volume 2)

Princeton: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1991. Hardcover. Very good/very good +. Hardcover. 12" X 8 1/2". 209pp. Presents nicely in protective archival sleeved dust jacket. Gentle shelfwear to dust jacket, with some bumping to head and tail of spine. Bound in full dark brown cloth, with spine lettered in gilt. A hint of shelfwear to binding, else fine. Binding is firm, tight, and sound. Pages are clean, bright, and unmarked. A very presentable hardcover in dust jacket of this second volume of The William Blake Trust and Princeton University Press' Illuminated Books of William Blake, illustrated in 54 plates faithfully reproduced from the original and a further 12 plates from other sources.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:
The core of William Blake's vision, his greatness as one of the British Romantics, is most fully expressed in his Illuminated Books, masterworks of art and text intertwined and mutually enriching. In 1949 the William Blake Trust was founded to bring these rare, in some cases unique, works to a wider general audience through the publication of superbly produced facsimiles of each book. By the late 1980's these facsimiles had themselves become rare books. The Trust accordingly resolved to initiate a collected edition that would publish accurate reproductions of all the Illuminated Books to be accompanied by notes and commentaries by leading Blake scholars. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, one of the best known of the books, is now reproduced for the first time from the King's College, Cambridge copy--sometimes known as "Blake's own copy." The poems have been edited with introduction, notes, commentaries, and bibliography. (Publisher).