Join Amazon Prime and get unlimited Free One-Day Delivery. Already a member? Sign in.

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
48 used & new from £17.00
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books
 
See larger image and other views 
Share your own customer images
Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.

William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (Paperback)

by David Bindman (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
RRP: £29.95
Price: £20.97 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £8.98 (30%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Want guaranteed delivery by Saturday, July 18? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details
31 new from £17.23 17 used from £17.00
Other Editions: RRP: Our Price: Other Offers:
Hardcover (illustrated edition) 4 used & new from £119.81
Paperback (60th Anniversary Ed) £29.95 £19.47 21 used & new from £17.14

Frequently Bought Together

William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books + Blake + Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (Oxford Paperbacks)
Price For All Three: £34.95

Show availability and shipping details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Blake

Blake

by Peter Ackroyd
3.7 out of 5 stars (7)  £6.99
The Complete Poetry and Prose

The Complete Poetry and Prose

by William Blake
3.0 out of 5 stars (2)  £15.95
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (Oxford Paperbacks)

Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (Oxford Paperbacks)

by William Blake
5.0 out of 5 stars (9)  £6.99
The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)

The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)

by William Blake
£11.89
The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies)

The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies)

by GE Bentley
5.0 out of 5 stars (2)  £16.10
› Explore similar items

Product details

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links

  (What is this?)
Business books for £5
   www.companionstore.co.uk    All books on this page now only a FIVER. Huge savings! 
MP3 Audio Book Downloads
   LearnOutLoud.com    Audio Books on Audio Download Audio Book Download For All Players 
Books for Penny
   www.GrabMore.co.uk    Low cost Shipping Dispatched Same Day from UK 
  
 

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
There has never been an edition of Blake's illuminated books so handsome, its pages filled with images to pore over in utter absorption. David Erdmann's The Illuminated Blake is still in print, and very useful, but the reproductions in that edition are all black and white, where this is in glorious Technicolor. One thing this edition allows the reader to do is register the different scales of Blake's various books--to see, for instance, just how tiny are the pages of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, such that you can completely cover them with your hand, compared with the coffee-table-sized later works. This Thames and Hudson edition of The Complete Illuminated Books is large format, A4 size, which makes for a spacious white border around the smaller images, but allows the larger books to be shown off in all their glory. And glorious they are; a unique, extraordinary sequence of interwoven visual and textual compositions; Blake's distinctively muscular figures (looking, it must be said, oddly modern, as if they have all just stepped out of the gym) sprawl and bound between blocks and columns of printed words. One of the most striking things is the disjunction between words and images at the basic level of legibility. The pictures are direct, vibrant and lucid; visually extremely expressive. Of the colour images, all of them are beautiful, psychedelically hued compositions making use of energetic diagonals and spirals in their composition. Blake's words, on the other hand, are often extremely difficult to read; particularly in the later "prophetic" books. Page after page is filled with minute handwriting in sepia-orange or grey. Its not that Blake's handwriting is unclear, but rather that the sheer bulk of text baffles the eye, copied so neatly onto the marginless block of the page with an obsessive, detailed miniaturised aesthetic. The editors, recognising this, reprint the words in type at the back of the book. But above all this edition drives home the point that Blake cannot be regarded separately as poet or visual artist; these two elements are always fused and co-existing. This wonderful, beautiful book makes that point impressively. --Adam Roberts

Review
`A book to be treasured'
--The Methodist Recorder

See all Product Description

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
Check a corresponding box or enter your own tags in the field below
william blake
poetry
british romanticism
illustration
art
18th century britlit
visionary
prophetic
profound
mysticism
mystical

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books
79% buy the item featured on this page:
William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books 5.0 out of 5 stars (5)
£20.97
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
6% buy
Songs of Innocence and of Experience 4.5 out of 5 stars (2)
£7.49
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (Oxford Paperbacks)
6% buy
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (Oxford Paperbacks) 5.0 out of 5 stars (9)
£6.99
The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)
5% buy
The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)
£11.89
Explore similar items
 

Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
5 star:
 (5)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, profound and inspiring!, 30 Aug 2004
---
Once you begin to read Blakes original works (text and images together - as Blake intended), you'll wonder why you ever read text-only versions. This book is stunning. The quality of the prints is extremely good. Amazon's blurred preview pages do the book no justice. A minority of pages are faint or difficult to read, but this is no fault of the current publishers - blame William Blake! Transcripts of all the texts are included to clarify any illegibility, but are not usually needed as most of the pages are clear and bright.

The editor's introduction to each illuminated book is brief. This allows the reader to dive straight into Blake's visionary world. Never mind if much of the text (especially of the later works) seems at first incomprehensible, Blake's illustrations are so vibrant and powerful on their own that they will keep you fascinated for a long time, and will help to cultivate a hungry curiosity that will eventually offer a way into his mysterious later texts. So what if you don't 'get it' ! Let go and just enter the mystery.

Having said this, many of Blake's earlier texts are much more easily accessible; 'All Religions Are One', 'There is no Natural Religion', 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience' 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', 'The Gates of Paradise'. There is plenty here to offer a rich introduction to Blake's mythology and also to help prepare you for his later works.

This is Blake's 'Bible of Hell' and no household should be without a copy.

Here is a list of the illuminated book included:

* All Religions are One, (Plate 1 Keynes Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum,. Plates 2-10 Huntington Library)
* There is no Natural Religion, (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, copies G and I and L)
* Songs of Innocence and of Experience, (Kings College, Cambridge, copy W)
* The Book of Thel, (Houghton Library, Harvard University, copy J)
* The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, (Pierpont Morgan Library, Copy F)
* The Gates of Paradise, (British Library)
* Visions of the Daughters of Albion, (Houghton Library, copy G)
* America a Prophecy, (The British Museum, Copy H)
* Europe a Prophecy, (Glasgow University Library, copy B)
* The Song of Los, (The British Museum, Copy A)
* The First Book of Urizen, (The British Museum, copy D)
* The Book of Ahania, (Rosenmald Collection, Library of Congress, Wash.D.C., and Fitzwilliam Museum, copy A)
* The Book of Los, (The British Museum, copy A)
* Milton a Poem, (New York Public Library, copy C)
* Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, (Yale Center for British Art, copy E)
* The Ghost of Abel, (Rosenwald Collection, copy A)
* On Homers Poetry [and] on Virgil, (Rosenwald Collection, Copy A)
* Laocoon, (Collection Robert N. Essick, Altadena, Calif., copy B)

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Simply fantastic, 6 Feb 2006
By Mr. A. J. Fairley "fairleee" (Tonbridge) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Blake was a visionary and a genius, a man who truly saw angels walking among men, and a man in whose powerful imagination London became Jerusalem. Blake was one of the most interesting characters of the 18th and 19th centuries, and lived in some of the most tumultuous times of the last thousand years. To truly appreciate Blake, you need to be able to see his illustrations along with his poetry, for Blake was not only a poet, he was also an artist. As I am studying Blake in my English class I can tell you that this is an incredibly worthwhile edition. The reproductions are fantastic; and include some rare plates in their full coloured glory. The volume tells you which edition of the plates are being reproduced (for Blake hand-made and hand-coloured each one individually and so every one is a little bit different), there is a brief introduction to each poem/collection allowing you to place it in context and also included are some of the "alternate" plates - plates found to exist in one version, but not another.
The size of the book allows you to view the plates as they should be viewed; hence, the smaller plates such as those of "Songs of Innocence and Experience" are reproduced to size but you the larger plates are also reproduced at a good size, allowing you to fully appreciate the work. It contains an excellent timeline and also a transcription of all the poems at the back of the book which is highly useful as sometimes, particularly with the smaller plates, Blake's writing can be rather small making it difficult to make out some words or phrases.
This really is a wonderful volume. The reproduction is among the best I have seen of his work - many reproductions tend to be rather faded, but not so with this volume - and I was so impressed with it that I ordered several more for my English teachers to use. If you want to fully appreciate Blake, then you have to see his plates, and this volume provides you with wonderful reproductions. If you have any interest in Blake, then this is the edition to get.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Blake, a poet of pure genious, 6 Nov 2004
ok, i am a soldier in the british army and by no means an intellectual. However, when I first set eyes upon this work I found no words in my vocabulary to express to complexity and detail of the world expressed in these pages. I thought that the poems had a visionary outlook upon life shared by no other person. If you like the works of blake or just like to vary your tastes you will find a world that involves you to such a degree that you will know no other poet to be as expressive as william blake in these works...
Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating
Absolutely superb text containing William Blake's original copperplate designs; many of which are companion to his seminal poetry collection: Songs of Innocence and Songs of... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Binro The Heretic

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspirational!
I came across William Blake a while back and i find his works inspirational! The colour and imagination put into each of his paintings coupled with the beauty of his poetry... Read more
Published on 14 Nov 2002

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

 Beta (What's this?)
This product's forum (0 discussions)
  Discussion Replies Latest Post
  No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
  [Cancel]

   

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Feedback

The Body Shop

The Body Shop - Vitamin C Skin Boost
Protect and boost your glow with The Body Shop Vitamin C Skin Boost.

›Shop The Body Shop

  

More From William Blake

Songs of Innocence...

Songs of Innocence and of Experience...

Blake was one of the finest craftsmen of his time, an artist for whom... Read more
£8.99 £6.99

 

Train Hard...Play Hard

Nike, Gola, Converse, and more
Gear up with up to 60% off athletic and outdoor shoes.

›Shop now

  

Treat Someone

Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificates--available in any amount from £5 to £500 With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is).

›Learn more about Gift Certificates

  
Ad

Where's My Stuff?

Delivery and Returns

Need Help?

Your Recent History

  (What's this?)
You have no recently viewed items or searches.

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.

Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session.
Continue Shopping: Top Sellers

amazon.co.uk Amazon Home
International Sites:  United States  |  Germany  |  France  |  Japan  |  Canada  |  China
Business Programs: Sell on Amazon  |  Fulfilment by Amazon  |  Join Associates  |  Join Advantage
Customer Service  |  Help  |  View Basket  |  Your Account
About Amazon.co.uk  |  Careers at Amazon
Conditions of Use & Sale |  Privacy Notice  © 1996-2009, Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates