(Blake, William). Paley, Morton D.; Butlin, Martin; editor. - William Blake's Watercolour Inventions in Illustration of the Grave by Robert Blair.

(Lavenham, Suffolk, England): The William Blake Trust, 2009. 2009. RARE LIMITED EDITION OF BLAKE'S INVENTIONS FOR THE GRAVE - Folio, 15 inches high by 11 inches wide. Handsomely bound in black moire silk cloth with morocco leather labels titled in gilt mounted on the front cover and on the spine, in a black cloth covered slipcase. 96 pages, illustrated throughout with color reproductions of the watercolor drawings and with black & white reproductions of the engravings, many full-page. Fine. RARE. First edition, limited to 186 copies, of which numbers 1-150 were for sale. This copy is marked "out of series". The illustrations come from high-quality digital photographs of the "inventions" when the series was still intact, as well as from reproductions of Schiavonetti's engravings of the Blake "inventions" which were featured in Robert Cromek's 1808 edition. The rejected engraving submitted by Blake, "Death's Door", is reproduced from the only extant proof. "In 1805 the engraver-turned-publisher Robert Cromek paid Blake one guinea each for twenty watercolour designs for his proposed edition of The Grave with the understanding that Blake would receive a further ten guineas each for engraving them. Instead, Blakes trial engraving was rejected and, to add insult to injury, his inventions were assigned for engraving to Louis Schiavonetti, the fashionable engraver of the day. His highly skilled but conventional renderings of twelve of the designs were, for almost 200 years, the only substantial record of Blakes contribution to the project. In 1836 the original watercolour designs passed through an Edinburgh sale room where they fetched far less even than Cromek had paid for them. Thereafter, they completely disappeared and were thought lost. In fact, 19 of the original 20 drawings were preserved intact in a handsome leather portfolio, custom-made to contain them and lettered simply designs for Blairs grave. In 2001 the portfolio and its contents came to light in a Glasgow bookshop from where they were bought by another bookseller for a sum ludicrously below their true value. Once the find was made public it was evident that the drawings were the lost watercolour designs and thus an unprecedented and major addition to the Blake canon. After an unedifying dispute over ownership the portfolio and its contents were again sold, privately, for a more realistic price. They were then offered as an entity to institutions and collectors at a price which, as it turned out, none could afford, or at least, was prepared to pay. Eventually, in the face of much protest, the portfolio and the 19 designs were offered for sale in 20 separate lots at Sothebys, New York, in 2006. The drawings are now widely dispersed and it is most unlikely that they will ever again be seen together." (From the publisher's prospectus). Fine .

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