The Proverbs of Hell

I can recall very vividly the day in 1975 when, one bleary-eyed afternoon – it must have been afternoon, as I rarely got out of bed much before lunchtime in those youthful days of very long nights – I crossed Broad Street in Oxford to have a browse in Parker's Bookshop, and came across a display of the newly-published OUP and Trianon Press facsimile edition of William Blake's illuminated book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I think it was probably one of the first books to awake my inner bibliophile: a perfect thing, a blue, cloth-covered hardback, about the size of a paperback novel, made up of proper sewn gatherings – already a rarity in the mid-70s – with blue-and-white end-silks, text and colour facsimiles of Blake's plates all printed on the same thick paper, and encased in a robust, cloth-covered slip-case with reproductions pasted on either side. I think it cost £7.50, quite a lot of money in 1975, but when destiny calls you just have to dig deep in your pockets [1].

Just this week I was tinkering with a collaged image of an owl that has gone through many versions but never quite found its rightful place, when it struck me that it would make an ideal illustration for one of the "Proverbs of Hell", as found in Blake's Marriage: "The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl that every thing was white". Naturally, I reached for that perfect volume in its customary place of honour on my bookshelves, and within minutes a potential new project was born. Which was good, as I had been feeling a little at a loose end since the dissipation of the impulse that had resulted in the several Let's Get Lost volumes.

It has been many years since I opened The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and I was surprised by the wave of nostalgia evoked by the ancient bits and pieces that were entombed inside, mainly slips of paper serving as bookmarks, but also tiny fragments that had ended up in the page "gutters", something that can only really happen with sewn bindings, where the gaps are deep enough to trap debris, notably shreds of tobacco. Tobacco! Not many books have survived the journey from when I, like a large proportion of the population in those days, was a smoker. Like coal fires and boys in short trousers, smoking as a habit of the professional classes belongs to a world we have left behind. I remember the occasional visit to my school's Staff Room during the lunch hour: your tentative knock would be answered by some teacher, generally with a pipe clenched between his teeth, and you'd be enveloped in the choking haboob of tobacco smoke that rolled out of the door. A pipe and its accompanying rituals and paraphernalia were as much a part of the male teacher's kit, then, as the elbow-patched tweed jacket. It is hilarious, now, to look at university group photographs from before the 1960s, ranks of fresh-faced boys got up as middle-aged men, complete with tweed, pipes, grey flannel trousers, and serious spectacles, as if in a fancy-dress competition [2].

Which may well go to show that, as Blake puts it in the Proverbs of Hell, "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction"; certainly, as Jean Rhys knew, tigers are better-looking. It's also the case that, in those far-off days of 1975, there was a certain self-justifying truthiness to that other famous Proverb, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". However, I'm afraid I got off the Excess Bus a stop or two before the Palace: I gave up smoking decades ago, and I'm in bed well before midnight, these days, and usually up by eight. I do still buy too many beautiful and expensive books, though [3] and, more to the point, keep on making these pictures and books of my own despite the fact that nobody else seems to want them. So, given another, lesser-known Blakean dictum, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise", there may be hope yet... Enough, or too much!

1. OUP obviously over-estimated the demand for Blake. For years afterwards this book could be picked up much cheaper in remainder shops, as could the substantial volume that followed shortly after from OUP, The Illuminated Blake, setting out the entire oeuvre, but in monochrome reproduction only, which was both overwhelming and surprisingly dull. I gave my copy to Oxfam a few years ago.

2. As opposed to the actual dressing-up box competition of my student days, which was really just a different kind of uniform...

3. A friend recently pointed me at the Japanese word "tsundoku", meaning "to buy too many books that lie around in piles, unread". Who, me?