BLAKEAN SMALL-PRESS PUBLISHING IN LONDON, 1969-2021: AN INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

In a review article that appeared in Publishing History in 1977, the late Morris Eaves wrote that William Blake’s ‘artistic decision to become an independent publisher’ was ‘a landmark in the history of publishing, not because he was the first or last to make that decision, but because he was far more aware than most others of why he was doing it’1. With exacting attention to matters of form, technique, and material production, Eaves chimed in on a growing wave of art- and book-historical studies of Blake’s body of work, which rose to a notable peak with Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book, first published in 19932. Such near-forensic studies of Blake’s self-published experiments in print media – best exemplified by the books of poetry and visual art that he called his ‘illuminated’ or ‘prophetic’ books – ran alongside a rather freer-flowing yet increasingly habitual adoption of Blake’s example as a paradigm for small and independent publishing practices. During the 1960s and 1970s, a series of self-proclaimed ‘Blakean’ presses took shape in the US and UK. Departing from the scholarly mould, these presses and subsequent Blake-influenced presses in their wake tended not to prioritise an assiduously strict adherence to Blake’s specific printing or publishing ‘system’ (if indeed it can be called that, given its various shifts over the course of Blake’s life)3. But regardless of their actual proximity to Blake’s specific model, these practitioners’ frequent evocation of ‘the spirit of Blake’, as Max Reeves put it in our interview, echoes Eaves’ impression of Blake’s example as a ‘landmark’ case of independent publishing.