Composition, Disorder, and the Dynamics of the Book Unbound
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2025
‘Blake’s Scattered Leaves’ explores the sibylline poetics of the poet and printmaker’s book making in America, Europe, The First Book of Urizen, and The Four Zoas, rematerializing Blake’s practices of invention and composition within and against constraints and teleologies of printing. Attention to material cultures of book making produces new readings of Blake’s sibylline metaphors and poetical possibilities, and practices of interleaving, repurposing of proofs, demediating the text, and freeing images as separate designs. Blake exploits the constitutively mobile potential of full-plate illustrations produced in different workshops, retaining that mobility in his illuminated books, where different placements make each copy unique and blur boundaries between different books. To capture the dynamic trajectories of mobile book parts or independent art works is to reconfigure the hybrid history of Blake books, questioning distinctions between book parts and artworks crystallized by institutional divisions of knowledge that separate the library from the print room.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.