Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Blake's own illuminated printing (Innocence 1789; combined Songs 1794) is the true first, and London is the place, but the work has no trade publisher and no edition structure — precedence questions of the UK-vs-US or original-language kind do not arise. The donor- and collector-attainable forms are two, and both should be named. First, the first letterpress (typographic) edition: London: W. Pickering and W. Newbery, published 9 July 1839, slim octavo, 74 pp., edited with an eighteen-page preface by the Swedenborgian James John Garth Wilkinson, who worked from Charles Augustus Tulk's illuminated copy; issued in original blind-stamped plum cloth. It exists in two states, with and without the poem "The Little Vagabond" on leaf F4r (p. 71); most copies lack it, and scholars dispute priority — whether the leaf was inadvertently omitted or deliberately suppressed over the poem's attack on the Church — so neither state should be sold as "the" first. References: Keynes 53; Bentley, Blake Books, 171a. Second, the great colour facsimile: the William Blake Trust / Trianon Press edition (London, 1955), reproducing the Rosenwald copy (Copy Z) in the Library of Congress by collotype with hand-stencilled colour — as many as thirty stencils per plate, applied by the master printers Beaufumé and Duval — in an edition of 526 copies. It is a facsimile and must always be described as one, never as a Blake original.