Digital Bibliography

Short: Blake was a sort of Renaissance-Savant. His manuscripts would have sucked if he hadn’t been. Collaboration Example: Architects/Clients. Call to Work on Your Collaboration Skills.

In a recent entry, I offered a working definition of a "book" as: "an historically situated, paginated object that represents and has emerged from a recursive negotiation between socially produced ideas, materials, and tools." Yeah, not great. But it’s got some important elements that are relevant to my discussion of Erdman’s discussion of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. Something akin to the illuminated manuscripts being purely Blake’s original vision because he had so much control over the whole process.

The first idea I want to talk about is the idea of control and process. (I also want to make it clear that I’m not trying to directly engage Erdman or Blake in this post. Just working through some ideas in response to the two writers.) From what I know of Blake’s process, experience, and skill he did, actually, have almost complete control over his process. And I would guess that it’s part of the reason the manuscripts are so damn stunning. But control has limits, and I want to think about how control cannot be taken for granted as resulting in texts resembling what the writer actually wants. Control is actually pretty useless, even potentially destructive, when it’s not accompanied by competence…

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