Blake!

This is not a post about Blake Lively, Blake Shelton, Blake Bortles, or Blake Griffin. This is about the only Blake that matters to the concerns of this course: William Blake (1757-1827), the English radical poet, artist, visionary, bookmaker. He's on the top right.

What can you say about Blake in a blog post? That he was the most revolutionary, most creative, most iconoclastic, most wonderful artist and poet that England has ever produced? Maybe Europe? Maybe the world? The last two would be overstatements, I'm afraid. Sound arguments can be made for Blake as the first "totalizing" book artist. Many people made artistic books, but it really wasn't until Blake that the sustained practice and genre that we loosely call "the artist's book" came into being.

The University of Virginia's:  Blake Archive

A film by the British Library:  Blake the Radical