ather
than seeing it as a challenge to the validity of his premise, Phillips
reads the absence of incorrectly registered impressions as evidence
of Blake’s genius at consistently concealing his hand. [16]
Phillips looked for other indications of two-pull printing, not
based on
absences, and found two. His first piece of positive evidence is
the title plate to Experience of Songs of Innocence and
of Experience copy T1 (illus.
41a). Because he can see with infrared light the etched date “1794”
lying under an opaque color (illus. 41b) ,
Phillips claims that Blake first printed the date in ink and then
the colors covering it (103). But Phillips does not argue (much
less prove) that the opaque colors were printed from the plate,
nor does he consider the possibility that these colors were painted
on the impression, as they often were. For example, the black opaque
colors in America copy A and Europe copy A were applied
to the impressions and are not printed from the plate. In Songs
of Innocence and of Experience copy E, “Infant Sorrow,” the
Experience title page and frontispiece, “A Dream,” and “The
Garden of Love” have a black color that is easily confused with
true color printing. The Book of Urizen copy B is described
by Bentley as being color printed (Books 170), but it is
not; black,
gray, green, and red opaque colors were applied over the black ink,
possibly while it was still tacky, to produce a reticulated effect.
A detail of the paint layer on plate 1 of The
Song of Los copy E (illus. 42) demonstrates that Blake used
his thick, opaque paints to finish color prints by hand, directly
on the impressions, as well as to color print from the copperplates.
The gray opaque paint in “The Fly” (illus. 43) of Songs of Innocence
and of Experience copy F, which was printed in the same session
as Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy T1,
demonstrates the same.
Colors applied to the
impression by brush are smoother and usually thinner than colors
printed from the plate, which are spongy or reticulated. The difference
is easily seen in the title plate of The Book of Urizen copy
D (illus. 44a-44b), where the reticulated bluish-gray color printed
from the shallows of the tablets and knees is outlined on the impression
in a darker hue of the same color. Note also that colors printed
over ink do not fully hide
but mix with the ink; that is, traces of the ink remain visible
in the reticulations of the colors, because colors and ink were
both printed wet. The
same effect is created when color and ink are printed sequentially
or if color is applied to wet or tacky ink. In fact, by adding opaque
colors to the impressions while the ink was still tacky, the facsimilists
of the Manchester Etching Workshop were able to create the look
and feel of printed colors, as is demonstrated by their facsimile
of “Infant Sorrow” (illus. 45; Viscomi, Recreating 11).
Colors brushed over dry ink appear smoother.
Phillips is right about the color over the date indicating a
second stage in the production of the impression, but that second
stage did not involve printing the color in a second pull. Had Blake
done that, the wet colors would have mixed with the wet ink. Rather,
the color was applied over the date when the impression was being
finished in watercolors and pen and ink. These overlying colors
have much smoother textures than the reticulated surfaces of printed
colors. Further, if the colors had been printed over the date when
the inked numbers were still wet, they would have mixed with the
colors and become streaked or fuzzy, or even dissolved completely
into the overlying colors. But, as Phillips' ultra-violet photograph
of the impression (his color plate 50) reveals, the underlying numbers
are clear and crisp. The colors must have been applied over the
date when the ink was dry—and the ink would not have been dry if
the overlying colors had been printed immediately after the first
pull as part of a two-pull printing process.
The evidence that the color over the date was applied as part
of the finishing, and
not printing, process is not merely based on technical necessity
and many precedents, but on a close examination of the impression
itself, which is much worked over in opaque colors and washes, and
on a comparison with the other extant impressions from the same
printing session, the Experience title plate in Songs
of Innocence and of Experience copies F and G (the impression
from copy H is untraced). In the copy F impression, the date is
left uncovered but the colors printed from the shallows wrap around
it in exactly the same pattern that we find in copy T1
(see illus. 46a for both impressions). The same pattern is present
in the copy G impression (illus. 46b). Since the space below the
date is blank (i.e., there are no relief lines creating the pattern),
it is reasonable to conclude that the repetition of this pattern
is not accidental but a matter of the impressions being color printed
in the same printing session without much adding or cleaning of
the colors between pulls. Moreover, the comparison reveals that
the white lines between shallows and relief areas, so overt in copies
F and G, are, in copy T1, completely
painted over in the same gray color as that covering the date. The
pattern of color printing shared by the impressions is further revealed
by changing the contrast and midtones in the T1
impression to
reveal the white lines of the escarpments and other unprinted areas
before being painted over (illus. 47). The color over the
date clearly belongs to the color added to the escarpments when
the impression was finished in colors and watercolors.
Phillips’ second piece of positive evidence is his claim that there
is a single tiny hole in the paper of the title page, “Introduction,”
“Earth’s Answer,” and “London” from the Experience section
of Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy T1.
These four impressions are now in the National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa. He states (98) that “in all four copies [meaning “prints"]
there is a pinhole in the upper left corner just outside of the
plate image (plates 49 & 66 [his reproductions of title plate
and “London”]).” According to Phillips, “this reveals that Blake
used the traditional method of registration for printing a single
sheet from more than one plate, but that he adapted the technique
so that he could print twice from the same plate” (98). This claim,
and the hypothesis that it indicates two-pull printing, is based
on the use of pinholes in multiple-plate color printing (illus.
10, 13),
in which the same-size plates were given pinholes, drilled into
the copperplates, in the same positions in each plate. Printing
from the first plate indents the holes into the paper; the printer
pricks the holes with pins and aligns the paper to these holes when
printing from the other plates. (Alternatively, the printer may
use such a sheet of paper as a key to prepare a stack of damp paper
with corresponding holes just before printing.) Registering paper
to plates using this method requires at least two pinholes
(Hayter 57), usually top and bottom, though four, one in each corner,
appears to have been the norm in the eighteenth century. Because
the sheet of paper blocks sight of the plate, this type of registration
is done by touch, i.e., a pin through the paper engages the corresponding
hole in the plate; the other pins feel for their holes, and when
the paper is in position, the paper can be dropped into place (Hayter
58). The holes Phillips claims he found were one per plate, each
near the top left corner of the plate.
When we first learned about Phillips’ claims about pinholes, we
were immediately dubious for reasons we will discuss below. When
we viewed the Songs of Experience title page from copy T1,
displayed in a shallow glass-covered case at the Tate Britain exhibition
(number 117c in the catalogue), we could not, from just a few inches
from the print, perceive any pinhole. What we
found instead were two specks in the sheet of paper near the top
left corner of the sheet. The speck nearest the top left corner
of the printed image may have been misinterpreted as a pinhole.
There are a few other similar specks in the left margin of the sheet
and stab holes for binding the leaves (illus. 48). Thus, the only
holes in the sheet were made as part of the binding procedure and
have nothing to do with printing the plate. Geoffrey Morrow, Senior
Conservator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the National
Gallery of Canada, confirms our findings and has informed us that
none of the four plates discussed by Phillips has a pinhole
(private written communication, 13 Aug. 2001). Rather, Morrow finds
in the top left corner of these four plates, and in all but one
print from Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the Ottawa
collection (for a total of ten plates), a small ink dot in the top
left corner of the plate. The one exception is “A Poison Tree,”
which has an ink dot at the top left corner of the framing lines
rather than the top left corner of the plate. Six of these marked
plates, plus “A Poison Tree,” are from copy T2,
which is not color printed. Thus, the ink dots could not be related
specifically to color printing processes.
There is no physical evidence that Blake ever experimented with
the pinhole method of registration. If the marks at the top left
corners of the Ottawa plates were made purposefully (as seems likely,
given their presence on so many plates), they could not have had
anything to do with registration since they could not have been
visible when the paper was placed, face down, onto the copperplates.
These marks were very probably made by someone other than Blake
after the impressions left his hands. Indeed, they were probably
made after the Ottawa plates were detached, as a separate
and autonomous group (Bentley, Books 421), from the other
T1 and T2
impressions, none of which shows any of the ink dots at issue.
If Phillips could not re-visit Ottawa to confirm the presence
of pinholes, then, as co-curator of the Tate Britain exhibition,
he was surely he was surely in a position to study at least the
title page to Songs of Experience on loan from Ottawa and
comment on the absence of a pinhole in his "Corrigenda"
published in Blake/ An Illustrated Quarterly 35 (2001):
30-31. Perhaps he worked from photographs and misinterpreted various
flaws in the paper or ink droplets, more or less at the top left
corners of the prints, as pinholes. Morrow tells us that, in his
correspondence with Phillips, he discussed pinhole registration
(see our note 17), but that he never told Phillips that there were
actual, observable pinholes in any of the Ottawa prints.
Theoretical superstructures rarely collapse even when their material
bases evaporate. It is certainly possible that someone somewhere someday
will find an impression of one of Blakes illuminated books with
a tiny hole in the paper. We wish to dissuade researchers of a future
age from leaping to the conclusion that such a hole has something to
do with registering plate to paper during printing. The reasons for
rejecting even the possibility that Blake used single-pinhole registration
extend well beyond the mere absence of physical evidence of actual holes.
Phillips does not explain why his supposed pinholes are outside the
edge of the plate (the traditional method called for the
holes to be in the metal itself), and suggests that Blake used a single
pin as an axis to somehow [17]
swing the paper off the plate, which was then removed, wiped of its
ink, applied with colors, returned to the bed of the press in exactly
the same position, and then the paper was swung (presumably being held
off the bed of the press by Mrs. Blake so it would not offset) back
exactly into place for the second printing. This seems highly unlikelyor
very likely to create a misalignment. One pinhole is only marginally
more effective than none at all and requires a second marker, such as
a guide line on a bottom sheet (see below), to bring the plate back
to its initial position; less than two per plate serves no purpose for
keeping the paper in a fixed position.
Besides the lack of practical utility if only one pin is used, it
is difficult to explain a circumstance in which only a single impression,
produced in a print run that included multiple impressions from each
plate, shows a pinhole. Blake printed x number of impressions from one
plate before moving to another plate in the same work. If pinholes were
made for the purpose of printing the plate twice upon the paper, then
the other impressions pulled from each plate in the same press run would
also have pinholes. Otherwise, we would be forced to assume that Blake
printed one impression with a pinhole, the others without, then moved
to a second plate using the pinhole method of registration for one impression,
but not for the others, and so on, moving back and forth between using
and not using pinholes. This would be an exceedingly inefficient printing
method. The assumption that any pinholes were made by Blake, let alone
for registration, stands on very shaky ground. Future discoverers of
tiny holes in Blakes relief-etched prints, color printed or not,
must consider such holes in the context of the press-run in which the
impressions were created and in light of their subsequent histories
of ownership, sale, and rebinding. [18]
Phillips, in his discussion of the supposed pinholes in the Ottawa
prints, acknowledges the fact that there are no pinholes in any
other color-printed impressions. This absence inevitably forces
him to conclude that Blake abandoned the procedure, quickly moving
on to find different ways to register the plates. [19]
Phillips suggests that Blake could have registered them by using
a bottom sheet, or by using the roller to grip and hold the paper
in place, or by using weights to hold the paper in place and mark
the plate’s position (101, 107). All three methods are used today
by fine-art printmakers printing multiple plates; but only one method,
the bottom sheet, is known to have been used by late eighteenth-century
printmakers. [20]
By explaining the ways modern printmakers register multiple plates,
Phillips again implies that Blake was more innovative than we have
realized. References to modern practices also make it seem less
improbable that Blake used two-pull printing. Had Blake used any
of these methods, however, he still would not have been able to
conceal two-pull printing so completely.
A printer can place on the bed of the press a sheet of paper
cut to exactly the same size as the sheet to be printed. Marks or
lines are then drawn on this bottom sheet, as it is
generally called, as guides to the placement (and later replacement)
of the plate on the bottom sheet. The sheet to be printed is then
registered to the four sides of the bottom sheet, thereby replicating
the registration of plate to bottom sheet. This procedure is repeated
before each pull through the press; registration is assured as long
as the plate is placed in its proper position on the bottom sheet
and all sheets to be printed are the same size as the bottom sheet.
The use of a bottom sheet is indicated by correct registration,
with evenly aligned margins between the edges of the printed image
and the edges of the paper. In the case of series work—that is,
printing a set of impressions from the same plate (and all printing
is to some degree series printing)—bottom-sheet registration is
indicated by the same sheet size and the same margins among all
members of the set. This is what we see in the facsimiles of sixteen
plates from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy B printed
by the Manchester Etching Workshop in 1983. Seventy-five impressions
were
pulled from each plate (35
monochrome and 40 hand colored in imitation of copy B). Using bottom
sheets under a sheet of Plexiglas designed to center plates to paper
(illus. 49) ensured uniform margins among all impressions from the
same plate. For aesthetic reasons, the sheets, at 21 x 17 cm., were
larger than Blake’s, approximately 18.5 x 12.5 cm., to create margins
of 5 cm. or more between the images and edges of the sheets (illus.
50).
But we never see any of these telltale characteristics
of bottom-sheet
registration in Blake’s illuminated books. We find
instead images that are misaligned to the paper, with top margins
greater than bottom, so that the image looks as though it were falling,
and images slanted relative to the edges of the paper, so
that the plate tilts to the left or right. For example, the top
margin of “The Lamb” in Songs of Innocence copy G (illus.
51) is 3.9 cm. while the bottom margin is only 2.8 cm., creating
an image that falls very noticeably. “The Shepherd” from the same
copy (illus. 52) slants to the left and, with a top margin of 4.5
cm. and a bottom of only 3.5 cm., falls on the page.
“The Little Boy Lost” from the same copy (illus. 53) tilts towards
the spine. Further, the margins of the
various impressions pulled from the same plate in the same printing
session all differ. All these characteristics violate the bibliographic
and print-publishing conventions of Blake’s time; slanted images
stray from any standard of alignment and symmetry. In general, the
registration of plate to paper in the illuminated books is quite
poor, possibly one of the features that prompted William Muir to
refer to Blake’s printing as “skillful carelessness.” [21]
Catherine and William Blake did not obsess over exact registration.
Indeed, in a deleted passage in his “Public Address,” Blake wrote
that “Spots & Blemishes” in works of art “are beauties &
not faults” (E 576). Nevertheless, the poor quality of Blake’s registration
of plate to paper no doubt comes as a surprise to most students
of Blake. Publishers of reproductions of the illuminated books generally
straighten the plates and usually trim to the image, because it
is the image and not the artifact that is being reproduced. Even
first-rate facsimiles, like those by the Blake Trust and Manchester
Etching Workshop, align the images on the paper. Examining the originals
themselves may not reveal much bibliographical information because
many have been disbound and mounted in mats. For example, “The Fly”
from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy F is professionally
matted to appear perfectly aligned (illus. 54),
but lift the mat and you can see that the image is too low on the
sheet (illus. 55). “The Little Girl Lost” in the same copy (illus.
56) is even more dramatically rescued by its mat; seen in its original
condition, though, the image falls and slants to the left (illus.
57). Nor
did the Blakes pay any more attention to the alignment of facing pages,
such as frontispiece and title plate. In
Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy F, neither
those facing pages in Innocence (illus. 58) nor those in Experience
are aligned, but for exhibition purposes they are matted to appear
so (illus. 59).
Phillips claims that Blake used bottom-sheet registration for all
his illuminated prints and not just the color prints (21). He acknowledges
that some images are misregistered, but finds most of these in “early
copies” and suggests that they evince the “constant attention” (21)
required to register plates to bottom sheets. The problems with
these observations are that the proportion of misaligned impressions
can be more than 50% of the prints in many copies of Blake’s illuminated
books, and that misaligned impressions appear in the vast majority
of illuminated books Blake printed, both early (as the 1789 and
1794 impressions above demonstrate) and late.
[22] “Earths Answer” in Songs
of Innocence and of Experience copy Z (c. 1825), for example,
is one of many plates
in this copy that is poorly aligned (illus. 60). The impressions
in Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy V (c. 1818)
are even more revealing. Nearly half the plates are misaligned,
with plates falling as much as 1.15 cm. (“Laughing Song”) and slanting
as much as 4 mm. (“The Little Girl Lost”). Such problems are visible
throughout copy V, which also provides another kind of evidence
that Blake did not use bottom sheets and
was not concerned about following guide lines. Blake drew four lines
in pen and ink around each plate to create a frame consisting of
three bands of different widths. He drew the pen lines over pencil
lines but rarely traced them exactly or erased them when visible
(illus. 61), nor did he stay within the lines when applying his
wash. Indeed, no frame in Songs of Innocence and of Experience
copy V is precisely rendered: pencil marks were not adhered
to, multiple pen lines form one framing line, corners are missing
because lines did not meet, colors spill over lines, and the bands
are not symmetrical (by as much as a 3 mm. difference) in width
on all sides. The frames are not uniform in size, nor do they try
to compensate for the poor registration of the plates, or try to
create uniform margins among the pages. In short, the pencil guide
lines, which are analogous to those on a bottom sheet, were either
poorly followed or ignored altogether. Blake’s talent for following
precisely his own guiding lines was never highly developed.
If Blake used bottom sheets to align his plates to his sheets of
paper, then he was improbably sloppy either in making or following them.
And if he knew that he was going to use bottom sheets, and going to
adhere strictly to aesthetic and commercial conventions regarding image
alignment, then why did he cut his sheets of copper to yield plates
that were all different sizes and shapes? The plates of Songs of
Innocence and of Experience, for example, vary from 11.0 x 6.3 cm.
to 12.3 x 7.6 cm., and very few are perfect rectangles (i.e., with the
same width at top, middle, and bottom, and same height at both sides).
Engravers took great care to square their plates so the embossed platemark
would be aesthetically pleasing, and publishers wanted uniform sized
plates for their books for similar reasons. Fifteen of the plates Blake
engraved for John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative, for example, vary
only 4 mm. in width and height, which in turn made it easy for a printer
to use a common bottom sheet for the print run. The fact that Blake’s
copperplates are rarely perfect rectangles makes registration inherently
difficult; even with careful registration, the uneven sides of the plates
cannot be aligned with the edges of a rectangular sheet on all four
sides. Nor can the plates be perfectly aligned to straight guide lines
let alone to a shared bottom sheet. For instance, if all the different
size plates were aligned to the same guide lines, then all the pages
in the book would share at least one (top or bottom) identical margin
at the expense of the other margins being overtly of different dimensions,
but that is certainly not what we see in the illuminated books. Instead
of fitting a series of plates to a uniform bottom sheet, Blake would
have had to fit sheets per plate—that is, prepare custom-made bottom
sheets. Such sheets would have been crucial in two-pull printing, because
that actually involves four registrations (see below), which requires
very precise guidelines and strict adherence to them.
Given all of these easily observed characteristics of the illuminated
books, Phillips’ proposals about bottom-sheet registration ask us to
believe that Blake had difficulty with a kind of registration that did
not require exact alignment, the purpose being to position properly
the plate on its sheet of paper (illus.
49), but could execute the enormously more difficult registration
required of two-pull printing over 650 times with only one mistake.
A closer look at the use of bottom sheets is in order. The plate
in illustration 62
lies on a sheet of Plexiglas under which lies a bottom sheet with
bold guidelines. The alignment of the plate differs from its previous
position, which is signified by the traces of ink on the Plexiglas
along the edge of the plate. Placing the plate on or near the proper
lines for a single pull is easy enough, and there is no penalty
if the alignments are only approximate or if they differ slightly
among impressions. But this method of registration is exceedingly
complicated for two-pull printing and, when not precisely executed,
has serious aesthetic consequences. It is easier to register paper
to plate with pinholes because that is a one-step registration,
no matter how many plates are used or where they are placed on the
bed of the press. You always register the paper to the plate, not
to the bed of the press, because the pinholes are in the metal plate
itself. [23]
The holes were drilled into the plate before printing, so that the
printer needed only to align the sheet to the plate with the four
pinholes. A bottom sheet for two pulls, however, requires preparation
time and four registrations as an essential part of the printing
process. After the printer and the assistant mark the bottom sheet
with guidelines, they must register the plate exactly to the markings;
second, they must register the paper to at least two edges of the
bottom sheet; third, after they remove the paper and plate from
the press, they must return the plate for its second printing and
again register it exactly to the markings on the bottom sheet; fourth,
they must again register the paper exactly to the same edges of
the bottom sheet. If during any one of these registrations the printer
is off by as little as a hairline in any direction (e.g., directly
on a guide line rather than next to it), the impression will be
slightly out of focus or at the very least reveal the hairline discrepancy
under magnification (illus. 18,
19, 20,
21).
It seems highly improbable that there would be no other poorly registered
impressions in color-printed illuminated books, other than the print
of Nurses song previously discussed. As noted, Phillips’
theory asks us to believe that Blake was amazingly skilled in registering
each plate twice, to yield over 650 perfectly aligned impressions,
something Le Blon, Jackson, and other commercial printers set up for
multiple plate work could not do—and to reconcile this with the clearly
observable fact that Blake was carelessly inexact in the registration
of plate to paper. The two-pull hypothesis generates these kinds of
inherent contradictions when considered in light of Blake’s characteristic
practices as printer and artist, and, as we will see, when seen in the
light of Blake’s theories of art.
Because the plates of an illuminated book are not uniform in size,
and because the sheets of paper they are printed on are not exactly
the same size, Blake could not have used the same bottom registration
sheet for all plates in the same book. Could Blake have used a different,
custom-made bottom sheet for each plate, or sheets with guide lines
to accommodate various sizes of plates? No, for the reasons given above:
their presence would be revealed in better alignment of plate to paper
than we find in Blake’s work, and this more exacting alignment would
be replicated in all other impressions pulled from the plate in the
same press run. Even if we abandon the idea that Blake printed multiple
impressions from each plate and assume for the sake of argument that
he printed only one impression before moving on to another plate, we
would still expect sheets that were aligned to bottom sheets to have
images registered more precisely to the printed sheet than we can observe
throughout the illuminated books. We would also have to explain the
waste of a great deal of paper to create many bottom sheets. And we
would be forced to embrace the now-discredited theory that Blake produced
his books per-copy rather than per-plate, one at a time rather than
in small groups, and embrace also all the economic and practical inefficiencies
that entails. While in principle registering paper and plate to a bottom
sheet appears to work well for the production of one impression, the
procedure becomes hopelessly complicated in practice when any one plate
is printed more than once, when it is part of a series, and when numerous
impressions are pulled from it. The technique breaks down by its own
clumsiness and inefficiencies that produce no aesthetic gain.
[24]
If ignoring the evidence that Blake printed per-plate rather than
per-book is not reasonable, then is it reasonable to suggest that Blake
used a bottom sheet exclusively for color printing? Putting aside the
thorny issue of Blake abandoning his direct mode of printing for a highly
mechanical one for two or three years, the answer is still no. The same
features noted above—impressions poorly registered to sheet edges and
no shared margins within a book or among impressions from the same plate/bottom
sheet—are true of color prints.
The presence of diverse margins among pages in the same book, as
well as in impressions from the same plate in the same printing session,
reveals that Blake did not waste paper for bottom sheets but instead
“eyeballed” the paper to the plate, which is still a common practice
today. [25]
Given what we have seen of William and Catherine Blake’s skill at registering
paper to plate and their apparent disregard for mechanical precision,
it is hard to believe either of them would have put the effort into,
or succeeded every single time but one at, these numerous registrations.
For impressions printed recto/verso, such as those in Songs of Innocence
and of Experience copy E, the paper would have been registered eight
times and passed through the press four times. It is difficult to envision
a more complex and inefficient method for producing color prints.
Phillips speculates that Blake could have used the roller of the
press to pin the sheet of paper down, holding it in place, while
the plate was removed, worked on, and returned to its place, which
could have been indicated either on a bottom sheet or by two metal
weights forming a corner where the plate was placed. According to
Hayter, who used this method in his Atelier 17, the “position of
the plate was marked with great precision on the bed of the press”
and a “longer than usual . . . sheet of paper” was required. Nevertheless,
like other registration methods, this one was not absolutely precise,
because “after only one pass through the press, the paper has become
stretched in length, and even when dry will never return exactly
to the length it once had; then again, owing to the slight displacement
of the blankets as the roller passes over the thickness of the plate,
the register cannot in theory be guaranteed to less than one-half
of this thickness” (58).
Blake would have encountered other problems with this method.
The circumference of the upper wooden roller of the eighteenth-century
press that was displayed at the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain
as an example of the kind he most likely used is 71.4 cm. [26]
On such a press, at least 11 cm. of paper is beneath the blankets
and the curvature of the roller when the margin of the sheet is
held in place by the roller. At least 5 cm. of the paper is completely
covered by the roller and blankets. To use this method of registration,
Blake would have had to use sheets at least 22.5 cm. long and place
the plate under the curvature of the roller. Slipping the plate
in and out of such a tight fit cannot be done without the paper
touching the top edge of the plate as you return it to its place.
But Blake’s sheets for the color-printed copies of Songs of Innocence
and of Experience were approximately 18.5 x 12.5 cm., which
means Blake could not have used this method because there would
not have been enough paper for the roller to grip. Plates like the
Experience title plate, at 12.4 x 7.2 cm., provided top and
bottom margins of only 3 cm. Nor could he have used this method
for There is No Natural Religion, copies of which were rudimentarily
color printed in two colors on paper approximately 14 x 11 cm. As
Hayter notes, the method required “a sheet of paper rather longer
than usual” (58). Given the small sizes of Blake’s paper, gripping
the sheet in place with the roller is the least likely way that
Blake could have proceeded. Even with a somewhat smaller roller,
as in modern presses (which range between 63 and 68 cm.), the hold-under-the-roller
method still wouldn't work for printing on the paper sizes Blake
used.
Holding the sheet in place with a metal weight and indicating
the plate’s position by two weights forming a corner is equally
inexact, particularly for small sheets of paper and small plates.
This technique is more suitable for large plates, the size of America
or larger, where a 1 mm. misregistration is less noticeable since
it is a smaller percentage of the whole. With a small plate, even
a slight misregistration is noticeable.
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