New from Bodleian Library Publishing: Ground-breaking edition of Blake’s 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'

A major new edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has just been published, reproducing one of the earliest and most important of the nine known copies, and presenting important new evidence on Blake's production technique for what he called his illuminated books. In the Introduction, scholar and printmaker Michael Phillips explains how through experimental printings, he replicated Blake's graphic techniques for illuminated printing, proving that Blake used mirror writing to draw his text and designs directly onto the copper plate, and that the technique was an extremely laborious and difficult process. This directly challenges recent scholarship on when the Marriage was completed and first published