Songs of Innocence & Experience; plus The Marriage of Heaven & Hell. With 50 original colour illustrations. (Aziloth Books) Paperback – Illustrated, March 30, 2015

This is nice enough book. It contains the texts (mostly accurate, but not trustworthy for scholarly purposes), and it has some nicely printed (though VERY pale) illustrations. The cover illustration offers a first warning, however, since the image is of a painting that has nothing to do with the Songs of Innocence & Experience nor Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The image is dramatic and eye-catching, but an uninformed buyer might mistake it as related to the poems inside.Further, though the book suggests that it offers the illustrated versions of the poems, it offers only trimmed or clipped versions, including only the "picture" but not the full pages which include the text in Blake's distinctive printed versions. The texts are, instead, printed separately, creating a completely inaccurate impression of Blake's art. In addition, several of the trimmed or clipped illustrations are not even part of the Songs, though the presentation does not offer any information about which copy of the Songs is used for this reproduction, nor are there any warnings that the images are from other sources entirely. (A glaring example is the illustration for The Tyger, which is actually trimmed from one of Blake's illustrations for Dante's Inferno. There are other less important examples.)For a Blake compleatist, who knows about Blake's actual works and artistic processes, this might be a reasonable purchase because such a reader will be aware of the misleading character of the presentation and can enjoy it otherwise for what it may be worth. A buyer who is unaware of these problems will either form incorrect impressions of Blake's works, which would be unfortunate in itself, or be in danger of making statements or claims about Blake's works (for example, in an assigned essay in a course) that would be incorrect through no fault of the student, since there is no editorial apparatus to indicate that the materials presented are distorted or inaccurate. I have two coples of this book, myself, and will keep one of them, but the friend to whom I give the second will have a full explanation of the defects of the book.It is worth mentioning that there are several reasonably priced editions, in paperback, of the three works in this volume, and those are not only accurate reproductions of the actual pages of Blake's artistic works, but they offer explanations and background helpful to a student and important to a scholar.

I regret paying this much when the quality of the illustrations is poor. :(