INSPIREDBYBLAKE
It wouldn't be a Blackwell's festival without an amazing selection of books. Why not pick up a beautiful new edition of Blake's works, or something #InspiredByBlake?
For even more choice, visit our Oxford shop page to see our selections of Blake books.
The nature of William Blake's genius is most completely expressed in his Illuminated Books. As poet and artist, Blake invented a method of printing that enabled him to create works in which words and images combine to form pages uniquely rich in content and beautiful in form.
Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers.
Now some 400 plates, drawn from the William Blake Trust's acclaimed six-volume Collected Edition, and reproduced under their supervision, provide for the first time ever in one volume what the London Review of Books hailed as 'sumptuous facsimiles...glorious coloured pages...like peeping into a furnace of light through a crack in the door'.
Buy it here.
Poet, painter, engraver and visionary, Blake's was a radical spirit fired by genius. Yet his life has remained an enigma. In this magnificent biography Peter Ackroyd discloses the true nature of William Blake's life and art.
"Marvellous...deeply moving and radiant with detail... What makes Ackroyd so exceptional among biographers is the range and beauty of his knowledge.This is a book to go out and buy at once." (Observer)
Buy it here.
A comprehensive catalogue which accompanies the Ashmolean exhibition William Blake: Apprentice and Master.
This catalogue details the life and work of the artist William Blake, arranged chronologically and outlining the development of his influence and career from apprenticeship to his final years. Blake was a radical, challenging both perception and belief, he created words and images that had a luminous quality, strongly influenced by an intuitive inner vision, he valued imagination over reason and his work reflects this.
Blake's work deeply affected and inspired the early work of the group of young artists and engravers known as the Ancients and this is a celebration of his influence upon their imagery, painting in tempera, and graphic techniques. A centerpiece to this collection will be his Manuscript Notebook, in which he wrote the Songs of Experience, one of greatest treasures of the British Library.
Buy it here.
FEATURED BOOK
Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier
Flames and funerals, circus feats and seduction, neighbours and nakedness: a sparkling historical drama from the bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Uprooting from their quiet Dorset village to the carnal streets of London, young Jem Kellaway and his family feel far from home. The Kellaways struggle to find their place in a tumultuous city, alive with repercussions from the blood-splattered French Revolution. Luckily streetwise Maggie Butterfield is on hand to show Jem the ropes. Together they encounter the neighbour they've been warned about: radical poet and artist William Blake. Jem and Maggie's passage from innocence to experience becomes the very stuff of poetic inspiration.
