# Is "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" by William Blake a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake (etched, printed and hand-colored by the author, London, 1789) is identified by: There is no "first edition" in the ordinary sense and no publisher: Blake relief-etched the copper plates by hand, printed them himself, and hand-finished each page in watercolour and other media, so every copy is physically unique and none can be identified by a printed point. Blake's own illuminated printing (Innocence 1789; combined Songs 1794) is the true first, and London is the place, but the work has no trade publisher and no edition structure — precedence questions of the UK-vs-US or original-language kind do not arise.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- There is no "first edition" in the ordinary sense and no publisher: Blake relief-etched the copper plates by hand, printed them himself, and hand-finished each page in watercolour and other media, so every copy is physically unique and none can be identified by a printed point
- Songs of Innocence was first printed in 1789; in 1794 Blake combined it with Songs of Experience under the general title "Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul", the combined work running to 54 plates (Innocence alone comprises 31 etched plates)
- Copies are not collated but identified — each is assigned a letter (Copy A, B, C … Z, AA and so on) in Sir Geoffrey Keynes's census and G. E. Bentley Jr.'s Blake Books, and copies B, C and D are the earliest combined copies, formed in 1794 from Innocence sheets printed in 1789 plus the complete Experience of 1794
- Only some seventeen or eighteen copies of Innocence are estimated to have been produced, and Blake continued to issue the two sets separately after 1794; posthumous copies were pulled from Blake's plates after his death and are recorded separately in the census
- Attribution of any purported original therefore runs through the Blake Archive and Bentley's census, never through points of issue
- Publisher imprint reads etched, printed and hand-colored by the author, London
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | William Blake |
| Publisher | etched, printed and hand-colored by the author, London |
| Year | 1789 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | There is no "first edition" in the ordinary sense and no publisher: Blake relief-etched the copper plates by hand, printed them himself… |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
There is no "first edition" in the ordinary sense and no publisher: Blake relief-etched the copper plates by hand, printed them himself, and hand-finished each page in watercolour and other media, so every copy is physically unique and none can be identified by a printed point. Songs of Innocence was first printed in 1789; in 1794 Blake combined it with Songs of Experience under the general title "Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul", the combined work running to 54 plates (Innocence alone comprises 31 etched plates). Copies are not collated but identified — each is assigned a letter (Copy A, B, C … Z, AA and so on) in Sir Geoffrey Keynes's census and G. E. Bentley Jr.'s Blake Books, and copies B, C and D are the earliest combined copies, formed in 1794 from Innocence sheets printed in 1789 plus the complete Experience of 1794. Only some seventeen or eighteen copies of Innocence are estimated to have been produced, and Blake continued to issue the two sets separately after 1794; posthumous copies were pulled from Blake's plates after his death and are recorded separately in the census. Attribution of any purported original therefore runs through the Blake Archive and Bentley's census, never through points of issue.

## Is this the true first?
Blake's own illuminated printing (Innocence 1789; combined Songs 1794) is the true first, and London is the place, but the work has no trade publisher and no edition structure — precedence questions of the UK-vs-US or original-language kind do not arise. The donor- and collector-attainable forms are two, and both should be named. First, the first letterpress (typographic) edition: London: W. Pickering and W. Newbery, published 9 July 1839, slim octavo, 74 pp., edited with an eighteen-page preface by the Swedenborgian James John Garth Wilkinson, who worked from Charles Augustus Tulk's illuminated copy; issued in original blind-stamped plum cloth. It exists in two states, with and without the poem "The Little Vagabond" on leaf F4r (p. 71); most copies lack it, and scholars dispute priority — whether the leaf was inadvertently omitted or deliberately suppressed over the poem's attack on the Church — so neither state should be sold as "the" first. References: Keynes 53; Bentley, Blake Books, 171a. Second, the great colour facsimile: the William Blake Trust / Trianon Press edition (London, 1955), reproducing the Rosenwald copy (Copy Z) in the Library of Congress by collotype with hand-stencilled colour — as many as thirty stencils per plate, applied by the master printers Beaufumé and Duval — in an edition of 526 copies. It is a facsimile and must always be described as one, never as a Blake original.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club editions exist for the illuminated work. The documented tells are of a different kind: (1) posthumous impressions pulled from Blake's plates after 1827, recorded in the Keynes/Bentley census and not to be confused with lifetime copies; (2) the 1839 Pickering and Newbery letterpress edition, which reproduces none of Blake's artwork and whose arrangement departs radically from Blake's own — one analysis found roughly 93% of the ordering altered, with forty-one changes to the poems' enumeration; (3) the Trianon Press/Blake Trust facsimiles of 1954-55 and the Manchester Etching Workshop reproductions of 1983, all of which are explicitly identified in their colophons; and (4) modern trade reprints such as the Oxford/Keynes and Princeton Illuminated Books volumes. Any copy offered as an original illuminated Blake that is not matched to a lettered copy in the Blake Archive/Bentley census should be treated as a facsimile or reproduction.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Songs of Innocence and of Experience* by William Blake a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/songs-of-innocence-and-of-experience
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.