Here are notes I put together in 2007, when the “new Blakes” (then still in private hands) were first displayed at Tate Britain.  I hope these notes may prove useful or at least encourage discussion when the “new Blakes” go back on display in July 2010. [Notes newly corrected 12 July 2010.]

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The latest [November 2007] Tate Britain display in their Blake room is entitled:  “William Blake: ‘I still go on till the heavens & earth are gone’”.  A group of newly-discovered prints, apparently once bound up as a book, like a Small Book of Designs now in the British Museum, is displayed alongside a print from the Tate collection which possibly formed part of the same set. The eight new prints contain just the illustration part of a few pages from three of Blake’s illuminated books—without the accompanying text that is present in the usual full version of the illuminated book.  Instead they have just a brief inscription handwritten beneath the image, yielding a total of thirteen lines of text that have been unknown until now. Tate Britain provides no fuller discussion of the new images.  There is just a brief mention on the gallery website: “a highlight is the private loans of recently discovered works which have never before been exhibited”.  I list the prints in the sequence in which they are displayed on the walls of Tate Britain, left to right.

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The First Book of Urizen, plate 2. Image only (no text), surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1794/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed by Blake below the framing lines: “Teach these Souls to Fly.” NUMBERING Paper has been cropped to a roughly square format removing any numbering. COLLECTION Tate (N 03696) The Book of Thel, plate 7. Image only (no text), surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1780/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed in Blake’s hand below the framing lines: “Doth God take Care of These” NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 5 (or 3?) COLLECTION Private Collection (X 23184)* * This is a running “Accession Number” given to all works loaned to the Tate. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 16. Image only (no text), surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1790/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed in Blake’s hand below the framing lines: “Who shall set”/“The Prisoners free” NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 4 COLLECTION Private Collection (X 23185) The First Book of Urizen, plate 7. Image only (no text), surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1794/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed in Blake’s hand below the framing lines: “I sought Pleasure & found Pain”. / “Unutterable” NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 9 COLLECTION Private Collection (X 23171) The First Book of Urizen, plate 11. Image only (no text), surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1794/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed in Blake’s hand below the framing lines: “Everything is an attempt” / “To be Human” NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 6 COLLECTION Private Collection (X 20172) The First Book of Urizen, plate 12. Full-page image surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper. DATE Dated 1794/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Written in an unknown hand and within the outer framing lines: The floods overwhelmed me NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 10 COLLECTION Private Collection (X 23173) The First Book of Urizen, plate 17. Full-page image surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1794/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed in Blake’s hand below the framing lines: “Vegetating in fibres of Blood” NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 8 COLLECTION Private Collection (X 23181) The First Book of Urizen, plate 19. Image only (no text), surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1794/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed in Blake’s hand below the framing lines: “Is the Female death” / “Become new Life” NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 1 COLLECTION Private Collection (X23182) The First Book of Urizen, plate 23. Image only (no text), surrounded by black ink framing lines.  Colour-printed from a relief-etched copper plate and finished with watercolours and pen and black ink on wove paper.  3 stitch-holes in left-hand margin. DATE Dated 1794/1796 by the Tate curators. INSCRIPTION Inscribed in Blake’s hand below the framing lines: “Fearless tho in pain” / “I travel on” NUMBERING Numbered in pencil, outside framing lines, in bottom right corner: 7. COLLECTION Private Collection (X 23183)

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The Small Book of Designs is a sequence of 23 quarto pages formerly bound into a book.  Each page is numbered—which may represent Blake’s original sequence.  It is now in the British Museum (disbound and the pages separately mounted).  The designs derive from Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing but the texts associated with the designs have been blanked out in printing. Linked to the BM set (“Copy A”) are a number of single prints which may be pages from a second copy of a Small Book of Designs.  This is sometimes referred to as Copy B.  Some of these “Copy B” prints carry inscriptions—cryptic, allusive—which suggest that Blake intended to create an emblem book on the lines of his intaglio-engraved The Gates of Paradise, but in rich colour.  The newly-discovered designs are on apparently untrimmed numbered quarto pages with stitch marks indicating they were once bound together.  This confirmation of a set sequence of images with inscriptions further supports the idea that the pages were intended as an emblem book. As the table below makes clear, there appear to be just two printings of each image.  The newly-discovered prints nicely fill the gaps in the sequence of known pages from Copy B.  The two exceptions are pages which are not represented in Copy A.  Could indeed the supposed Copy B prints from Urizen plates 9, 12, 13 once have formed part of the Copy A sequence?  The problem with that suggestion is that none of the Copy A prints carry inscriptions whereas Urizen 9, 12, 13 are inscribed in ink, some possibly in Blake’s hand.  Further checking for stitch-holes, and measurement of the gaps between holes, might clarify what belongs in what sequence. The images in the Small Book of Designs, copy A, are colour-printed—that is printed from coloured inks painted on to the copper plates—with little additional work after printing.  My knowledge of the BM prints derives mostly from reproductions, but it seems to me that the new prints are not so heavily printed; the images have been substantially reworked and strengthened in watercolour and with pen and ink work.  This suggests that the new set consists of second pulls from the same inking as the BM set.

Source	Copy A (No)	Copy B (No)	New Set (No)
Urizen plate 1	British Museum (1) No inscription	Keynes “Which is the Way” | “The Right or the Left”
Marriage plate 11	British Museum (2) No inscription	Princeton “Death & Hell” | “Teem with Life”
Urizen plate 17	British Museum (3) No inscription		Private Colln (8) “Vegetating in fibres of Blood”
Marriage plate 16	British Museum (4) No inscription		Private Colln (4) “Who shall set” | “The Prisoners free”
Marriage plate 14	British Museum (5) No inscription	Rosenwald (9) “A Flaming Sword” | “Revolving every way”
Marriage plate 20	British Museum (6) No inscription	Anonymous Colln “O revolving serpent” | “O the Ocean of Time & Space”
Urizen plate 23	British Museum (7) No inscription		Private Colln (7) “Fearless tho in pain” | “I travel on”
Urizen plate 24	British Museum (8) No inscription
Urizen plate 3	British Museum (9) No inscription	KeynesOh! Flames of Furious Desires
Thel plate 2.	British Museum (10) No inscription
Urizen plate 27	British Museum (11) No inscription
Urizen plate 2	British Museum (12) No inscription	Tate “Teach these Souls to Fly.”
Urizen plate 8	British Museum (13) No inscription
Urizen plate 19	British Museum (14) No inscription		Private Colln (1) “Is the Female death” | “Become new Life”
Urizen plate 10	British Museum (15) No inscription	Yale (20) “Does the Soul labour thus” | “In Caverns of The Grave”
Thel plate 6	British Museum (16) No inscription
Visions plate 3	British Museum (17) No inscription	Keynes (22) “Wait Sisters” | “Tho all is Lost”
Urizen plate 7	British Museum (18) No inscription		Private Colln (9) “I sought Pleasure & found Pain”. | “Unutterable”
Urizen plate 11	British Museum (19) No inscription		Private Colln (6) “Everything is an attempt” | “To be Human”
Visions plate 10	British Museum (20) No inscription
Urizen plate 5	British Museum (21) No inscription	Yale (19) “The Book of my Remembrance”
Thel plate 7	British Museum (22) No inscription		Private Colln (5) “Doth God take Care of These”
Thel plate 4	British Museum (23) No inscription
Urizen plate 9		Princeton (13) “Eternally I labour on”
Urizen plate 12		Pierpont Morgan I labour upwards into |  futurity | Blake	Private Colln (10) The floods overwhelmed me
Urizen plate 13		Joseph Holland “Frozen doors to mock” | “The World: while they within torments uplock.”

Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/nov/11/artnews.poetry