William Blake

Drucker refers to William Blake's work as auratic. By this I believe she means that his work emanates an energy. It radiates something. Blake's collaboration of image and text is very good. Each piece is an artwork. The text neither detracts or overrides the image. Or vice versa.


Blake's books were all hand coloured. Blake used etching combined with printing:
"Engraving: On 12 April 1827, shortly before he died, Blake wrote to George Cumberland thanking him for trying to sell copies of Blake's illuminated books and his recently published engraved illustrations to the Book of Job. Blake had first executed the Job illustrations as watercolor drawings for Thomas Butts around 1805, followed by a duplicate set for John Linnell, who commissioned him to engrave the series in 1823.
Three years later, Blake had 22 line engravings that looked very different from the tonal prints then popular. Indeed, they even looked different from engravings, his own included, for they were not executed in the standard "mixed method" technique, in which designs were first etched and then finished as engravings. In this technique, which Blake mastered as an apprentice, the design's outline was traced with a needle through an acid-resistant "ground" covering the copper plate and then etched with acid. The engraver went over these slightly incised lines with burins (metal tools with square or lozenge-shaped tips used to cut lines into the plate) and engraved the plates entire surface, uniting all parts in a web of crosshatched lines. ill. 1 ill. 2 ill. 3 ill. 4 ill. 5 ill. 6 ill. 7 These advances in technique enabled "modern" engravers to represent mass and tone more convincingly than the more linear style of such "ancient" engravers as Blake's heroes, Durer and Raimondi, whose works were often dismissed as "Hard Stiff & Dry Unfinishd Works of Art" (anno. Reynolds, E 639). The Job engravings were executed entirely with burins and without preliminary etching, with tone subordinate to line and texture and with lines amassed in parallel strokes rather than in the conventional "dot and lozenge" pattern (dots incised in the interstices of cross-hatched lines, the linear system characteristic of bank-note engraving; see ill. 8 ill. 9 ill. 10 . Blake's emulation of the ancient engravers produced a modern result: original artistic expression in a graphic medium whose materiality and natural language were fully exploited. ill. 11 ill. 12 It was the masterpiece of his lifetime as an engraver, but it would be a tough sell, as Blake and Linnell, who had 315 sets printed in early 1826, must both have realized. " http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/about-blake.html


These techniques of William Blake's influenced his relationship between text and image through representing mass and tone more realistically. He had contributed a new style to the art world.

The Song of Innocence and Experience:"This lyric anthology evokes a predominantly pastoral world prior to the dualisms of adult consciousness. Human, natural, and divine states of being have yet to be separated. The child is the chief representative of this condition; other recurrent figures, such as the shepherd and lamb, point ultimately to the figure of Christ as the incarnation of the unity of innocence. In a few poems, the rhetoric, irony, and divided consciousness of experience begin to insinuate themselves into the landscape of innocence. In 1794, Blake combined Innocence with its contrary companion, the Songs of Experience, to create the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience." http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=s-inn&java=yes


I have looked at versions B and U. Version B is colourful with outlines. But in comparison version U is in black and white. The ink seems quite a bit darker and the whole image seems to be more detailed. I think the version you were reading would of course affect the way you would read these books. Just from the two I've compared, one would read light and airy and the other would read quite severely and detailed.