"HERE ALONE I, IN BOOKS FORM'D OF METALS,/ HAVE WRITTEN THE SECRETS OF WISDOM": LAVISH TRIANON PRESS LIMITED EDITION FACSIMILE OF BLAKE'S THE BOOK OF URIZEN

BLAKE, William. The Book of Urizen [facsimile]. (London: Trianon Press for the William Blake Trust, 1958). Large quarto, original half burgundy morocco, marbled boards, top edge gilt. Housed in original matching marbled slipcase. $1800.

Fine Trianon Press limited edition facsimile, number 70 of 480 copies (from a total edition of only 526), on Arches paper, finely reproducing in color the 27 leaves of Blake's vibrantly illuminated poem. Printed for The William Blake Trust from the Lessing J. Rosenwald copy in the Library of Congress, with bibliographical note by Blake expert Geoffrey Keynes.

"Blake's next project in illuminated poetry was potentially enormous—a version of Genesis, perhaps as the first book in the 'Bible of hell' announced in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The First Book of Urizen (1794) ranges beyond a satanic retelling of the Bible to establish an even more primordial perspective and construct an ur-myth in which material creation—spatial, temporal, and biological—is one with the fall. Urizen and Los, representatives of both cosmic and psychic forces, are the chief actors in the agonistic drama. There is no 'second' book of Urizen; but the brief poems The Book of Los and The Book of Ahania, both etched in conventional intaglio in 1795, are fragments of Blake's grand intentions" (ODNB). "The Book of Urizen contains the first part of Blake's conception of the universal myth. It recounts the story of the creation of the material world and of mankind, and so has to deal with the inherent problem of evil" (Keynes, "Bibliographical Statement"). Bentley, Blake Books 40. Bookplate.

Minor rubs to slipcase only. A fine copy.