------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 4 Today's Topics: Re: Blake's Milton Blake sighting Re: Blake's Milton New Blake book Re: Blake's Milton Blake sighting Re: Blake's Milton, the Blake Archive, Copyright and Permission Re: Blake's Milton Re: New Blake book Re: the elctronic Erdman Re: the elctronic Erdman ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Jan 96 12:26:57 CST From: Mark Trevor Smith To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's Milton Message-Id: <9601181830.AA28566@uu6.psi.com> This is great news. I look forward to seeing the whole Milton. Have you asked Richard Record for advice? On Tue, 16 Jan 1996 21:30:29 CST Edward Friedlander, M.D. said: >I am, even as you write, trying to set up my own server. The first >item will be Blake's "Milton", fully scanned in, and fixed up nice so >that folks will want to stop by and enjoy the story. > >Any suggestions on how I should go about doing this? Thanks. > ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 20:18:42 -0600 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake sighting Message-Id: <96011820184238@womenscol.stephens.edu> Chapter Four of Morton Cohen's new biography of Lewis Carroll ("The Child" 104-121) gives careful attention to the influence of William Blake (and Wordsworth) on Dodgson's thinking about children and the general subject of the construction of childhood during the Victorian era. According to Cohen, Dodgson "learns from, agrees with, admires, and echoes Blake; and we understand Charles better by recognizing as much. Like Blake, he refused to moralize childhood, he revered it in all its manifestations" (112), and "He owned Blake's works and Alexander Gilchrist's magisterial life of Blake. At Oxford in 1863, he commissioned Thomas Combe to print for him on large paper some of Blake's *Songs of Innocence*. He presumably had a quantity of copies struck, perhaps to give to child friends." Others have observed the line from Blake through Carroll and Lear and Dickens to Christina Rossetti and beyond, but this is a very interesting chapter, if not entirely original. Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 23:25:36 -0500 (EST) From: Nathan Miserocchi To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's Milton Message-Id: <9601190425.AA06004@abacus.bates.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1737 On January 18th, ROONEY writes: > > Something must be protected from copy rights somehow. Many web sites > dedicated the Simpson's have been shut down by fox's laywers. The note's > left by the owners indicate that if they didn't shut down thier site fox > would sue. > > I agree: copyrights for contemporary works need protecting in today's world. But what about Blake's work? Who owns it? Since it is being put on the Web by Professors Eaves, Essick and Viscomi (who also edit that wonderful Princeton edition of Blake) at no fee to view, i.e., not for profit, who would mind if the rest of the scholarly, and the psuedo-scholarly, world wanted to give Blake more exposure? I assume here that the above Professors have permission to use the plates, and Princeton's facsimiles of the Plates. Maybe that's the crux -- that it's not Blake's work, but the work of the publisher who's book your scanning the facsimile from. To put forth a question, then, who does one ask for permission to reproduce a Blake plate on the Web? Also, if the Blake Archive will make the Plates available, what harm if others also want to show them on their site, non-profit of course? Perhaps the idea would be to keep Blake's materials in the hands of the most learned so it is "done right"? That doesn't seem the correct assumption, so I'm in a quandary here. -- ***************************************************************** Nathan P. Miserocchi nmiseroc@abacus.bates.edu "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Eph. 6:12) ***************************************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 22:41:24 +0800 (SST) From: LIM WEE CHING To: blake@albion.com Subject: New Blake book Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Greetings all, I read a review recently of a new book featuring most if not all of Blake's illuminated poems. Unfortunately, my mom lost the issue of that set of papers, and hence the title of that book. I know that they are available in the bookstores here in Singapore (that's news!) 'cos the review says so but none of the incompetent fools in the shops seem to know what I'm talking about. ("I can only help you if you have a title") So if anyone out there knows the title to anything that fits that discription that was published recently, I'd appreciate your help. Private e-mail would be welcome so as not to disrupt the discussions on "Blake". Thank y'all. CHING ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 11:51:37 -0500 (EST) From: jlynch@dept.english.upenn.edu (Jack Lynch) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's Milton Message-Id: <9601191651.AA44015@dept.english.upenn.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2469 NM: Copyrights for contemporary works need protecting in today's world. But what about Blake's work? Who owns it? Blake's works themselves are now in the public domain, meaning anyone can copy any of them freely. But that doesn't apply to any particular _edition_ of Blake's works. You can't copy Alicia Ostriker's Penguin edition, for instance; although the words are Blake's, the effort of assembling them is Ostriker's. She spent a tremendous amount of time examining early editions, comparing them, considering the merit of one reading over another, and so on. The same applies to any modern editor of any public-domain text. Even if the editor is personally glad to see the material distributed, the publisher (which usually holds the copyright) is probably unwilling to make available for free what they've already paid to publish. Blake's works pose a problem that doesn't come up with many other authors: the illuminations, which are unique in each copy. The original plates themselves are out of copyright, but the physical plates themselves are owned by individuals who needn't permit you to copy them. And it may well be a violation of copyright to scan from a published facsimile, provided the edition is still protected by copyright. (Facsimiles, though, may have a hazier copyright status; my knowledge stops there.) As a general rule (at least in America, beyond which I'm mostly ignornant), if the physical object you plan to scan or transcribe was produced after 1920, it's probably protected by copyright. You're safe, however, to scan or transcribe any text that was published before that. NM: Perhaps the idea would be to keep Blake's materials in the hands of the most learned so it is "done right"? That doesn't seem the correct assumption, so I'm in a quandary here. While that may be in the minds of some, there's a less insidious reason. Those who "do it right" -- i.e., who work from early editions, transcribe them by hand, spend months considering textual variants, proofreading, &c. -- expect to receive some compensation (however meager in the world of academic publishing) for that editorial work, and that compensation usually comes from publishers. If, however, their work is distributed for free, the publishers can't recover any of their expenses. So if you want to work from early editions, there's nothing stopping you. But you can't freely distribute the fruit of others' labor. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Jan 96 12:58 EST From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake sighting Message-Id: <9601191800.AA29558@uu6.psi.com> Thanks, Tomdill! --I wrote a paper on Lewis Carroll's views on the education of girls last year which I'm delivering at a conference at NYU in February-- I prefaced that paper with "Piping down the valleys wild. . ." without realizing that anyone had written on Carroll's being inspired by Blake. . . Has anyone found any other connections between Carroll and Blake? --Elisa - - The original note follows - - From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake sighting Chapter Four of Morton Cohen's new biography of Lewis Carroll ("The Child" 104-121) gives careful attention to the influence of William Blake (and Wordsworth) on Dodgson's thinking about children and the general subject of the construction of childhood during the Victorian era. According to Cohen, Dodgson "learns from, agrees with, admires, and echoes Blake; and we understand Charles better by recognizing as much. Like Blake, he refused to moralize childhood, he revered it in all its manifestations" (112), and "He owned Blake's works and Alexander Gilchrist's magisterial life of Blake. At Oxford in 1863, he commissioned Thomas Combe to print for him on large paper some of Blake's *Songs of Innocence*. He presumably had a quantity of copies struck, perhaps to give to child friends." Others have observed the line from Blake through Carroll and Lear and Dickens to Christina Rossetti and beyond, but this is a very interesting chapter, if not entirely original. Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 11:48:44 -0500 (EST) From: Morris Eaves To: blake@albion.com Cc: in@"viscomi@jefferson.village.virginia.edu", in@"RESSICK@ucrac1.ucr.EDU" Subject: Re: Blake's Milton, the Blake Archive, Copyright and Permission Message-Id: <01I06Z4DFL428Y4YM4@db1.cc.rochester.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Let me add a couple of sentences in hopes of preventing some possible confusion. The Blake Archive project is not being based on facsimiles (Princeton/Blake Trust or other) but on first-generation (i.e., "original") transparencies (of various sizes, depending on what is being reproduced) of the illuminated books (and other works). Because the _owners_ of the original objects (collectors, museums, whatever) must give their permission to reproduce the works by Blake that they own, the Archive won't make images available at its Web site _until_ permission is granted. Meanwhile, work on the Archive proceeds daily--and intensively. Some of that work involves acquiring transparencies and scanning plates from the work, of course. But that's the tip of a large iceberg of work that is going into creating what we trust will be an immensely useful research tool. For instance, everything going into the Archive (texts and images) is being marked up heavily in (the markup language called) SGML (of which HTML, the markup language of the Web, is a subset). SGML will help make the Blake Archive profoundly searchable--much more than a collection of scanned images. I could go on and bore you to death by telling you much more than you want to know. The long and short of it is that we're attempting, at every stage, to set an example of what an electronic archive should be--in quality of images, quality of texts, quality of markup, searchability, etc. etc. Morris Eaves (for Bob Essick and Joe Viscomi) At 11:25 PM 1/18/96 -0500, you wrote: >On January 18th, ROONEY writes: >> >> Something must be protected from copy rights somehow. Many web sites >> dedicated the Simpson's have been shut down by fox's laywers. The note's >> left by the owners indicate that if they didn't shut down thier site fox >> would sue. >> >> > >I agree: copyrights for contemporary works need protecting in today's >world. But what about Blake's work? Who owns it? Since it is being >put on the Web by Professors Eaves, Essick and Viscomi (who also >edit that wonderful Princeton edition of Blake) at no fee to view, i.e., >not for profit, who would mind if the rest of the scholarly, and the >psuedo-scholarly, world wanted to give Blake more exposure? >I assume here that the above Professors have permission to use the >plates, and Princeton's facsimiles of the Plates. Maybe that's >the crux -- that it's not Blake's work, but the work of the publisher >who's book your scanning the facsimile from. > >To put forth a question, then, who does one ask for permission to reproduce >a Blake plate on the Web? Also, if the Blake Archive will make the Plates >available, what harm if others also want to show them on their site, >non-profit of course? > >Perhaps the idea would be to keep Blake's materials in the hands of >the most learned so it is "done right"? That doesn't seem the >correct assumption, so I'm in a quandary here. > >-- >***************************************************************** >Nathan P. Miserocchi nmiseroc@abacus.bates.edu > >"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but >against principalities, against powers, against the >rulers of the darkness of this world, against >spiritual wickedness in high places." (Eph. 6:12) > >***************************************************************** > > ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 11:36:18 -0800 From: Devine/Apple@eworld.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's Milton Message-Id: <960119113611_22833677@hp1.online.apple.com> I am grateful to those who are publishing facsimiles of Blake's plates on the Web. Copyright is meant to protect people from having their work stolen and profitted from by thieves. I don't think this would apply to Blake's prints or plates or paintings, these days. As someone wrote, Blake himself is long gone, and we are talking here primarily of the art, not of the edited texts, which (I agree) are the fruit of the editors' labors, and should be treated with respect for their effort. I see no way in which anyone's work will be unjustly stolen in this enterprise: The prospect of viewing Milton or Jerusalem on my monitor, or printing it from Web images on any color printer available in the foreseeable future, does not seem a credible alternative to purchasing a well-printed facsimile. But I'd love to have the images given a wide audience through the Web -- if anything, I think it would boost sales of all the editions in the bookstores. A separate issue is a digital edition of the text-- one that could be searched through (for example) by the "Find" function available in any word processor. That would be a tremendous help in any scholarly work. Some interesting examples are already available on eWorld (I downloaded "Troilus and Criseyde" the other night). Anyone can create a digital edition by using a printed edition, a scanner, and Optical Character Recognition software: but a lot of effort would be required to correct the resulting file. I expect the digital editor would want to be paid for his/her labors, too, and that would be right. Does anyone know if a digital edition of Blake is being worked on? --Tom Devine ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 15:38:19 -0600 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: New Blake book Message-Id: <96011915381893@womenscol.stephens.edu> Hello again, Ching. I suspect the review you saw would be of the series of facsimile volumes (6 volumes in all) published by Princeton University Press. These were under the general editorship of David Bindman and reproduce the actual plates of Blake's illuminated books in beautiful color, close to the actual size (except for Jerusalem) and with valuable commentaries. These books range in price from $65 to $85 dollars, but _Songs of Innocence and of Experience_ has recently been issued in a paperbound edition for $24.95. That makes me hope the other volumes will also be available in paper sometime soon. The other book that might have been reviewed is David Erdman's _The Illuminated Blake_. This has been available for a number of years from Doubleday, but was recently republished by Dover Press as a paperback for about $20.00. This is a wonderful bargain, as it includes black and white plates of every illuminated plate Blake produced, plus very useful interpretive commentary by David Erdman. Dover provides many excellent inexpensive books, including nice and cheap color editions of _Songs of Innocence_ _Songs of Experience_, _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ and _America and Europe_. These are all about 6 or 7 dollars apiece. Tell your bookseller to get a Dover catalogue or just order from Dover. If you need the ISBN numbers, let me know, I can send them. Hope this helps. Tom Dillingham ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 18:33:28 MET From: "DOERRBECKER D.W." To: Devine/Apple@eworld.com, blake@albion.com Subject: Re: the elctronic Erdman Message-Id: <96BA8982365@netwareserver.uni-trier.de> January 22nd, 1996 Apart from the editors of the Blake Archive who, eventually, will offer an edition of text and images in the illuminated books, Professor Dr. H. Nelson Hilton of The University of Georgia at Athens is also working on an electronic edition of Blake's writings, based on Erdman's revised edition of 1982/1988. Nelson has a web page at Athens which provides more details of his project. Best wishes, D.W. Doerrbecker ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 10:07:53 -0800 (PST) From: Steven Marx To: blake@albion.com Cc: Devine/Apple@eworld.com, blake@albion.com Subject: Re: the elctronic Erdman Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Together with a colleague and students, I've put together three Hypertext Multimedia Interactive versions of Blake Illuminated Books. For more information see this web site: http://luigi.calpoly.edu/Marx/Blake/blakeproject.html I'd welcome your responses Steven Marx -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #4 ************************************