William Blake's Illustrations to the Grave

I bought a book from a yard sale titled 'William Blake's Illustrations to the Grave'
It is large and yellow.

The last page reads, "This book has been printed by photo "offset litho"graphy from the orgiginal edition of 1804. It is number three in the Double Elephant "San Vito PreB series. ...................................
.................................................

SEATTLE
8.xi.1969

Copyright, 1969 by Double Elephant Folio & Quarto Co., Inc.



It is FULL of beautiful large full paged illustrations.
Ive googled it and have seen prices from $12-$173


Im not sure what the "It is number three in the Double Elephant .... series" means.
Does anyone know anything about this book?

 

Check Abebooks and Quill & Brush.

 

This is the only book I found under the “Double Elephant Folio & Quarto Co.” banner. There are a couple other titles under “San Vito Press”. My guess is that San Vito was the publisher/distributor, and Double Elephant was the printer… but that’s purely a guess.

I can’t find anything on Blake’s original art. Several references concerning this book say that the prints are from an 1808 book “Original Inventions of William Blake” that contains 12 plates from Blake’s work etched (engraved?) by Luigi Schiavonetti (1765–1810), with copies in the Library of Congress and the Huntington (amongst others).

Most of the listings mention 'No3 in the series' without any other explanation. It doesn’t seem to bother those sellers... although enquiring minds do want to know.

I did find an intriguing (if irrelevant) reference to a different edition published in 1926 “from the Original Plates in the possession of an American collector”. Don’t know if those are the Schiavonetti plates, or what.

It is possible that the original art is lost and that the Schiavonetti is the earliest extant record.

This link shows an illustration from the 1808 edition:
http://collections.artsmia.org/art/...nventions-of-william-blake-luigi-schiavonetti

And this screen capture is from "A Blake Bibliography: Annotated Lists of Works, Studies, and Blakeana" (includes that reference to original plates):

 

"It is large and yellow."

How large? Double Elephant is a folio size.

 

The link to the image is in the book.

Ill measure and take pictures tomorrow during daylight.

The pages are not "normal" book pages.
It seems they printed on one side of a long sheet, folded it in half, and bound the loose edges leaving the "bent" side as the pages edge.

 

Too small for double elephant and bigger than quarto.

 

Paper used to have lots of names for a wealth of sizes.

http://home.clara.net/brianp/paper.html

Your publisher probably uses the term double elphant loosely or because it sounds big and archaic. They were, after all, Americans.

To complete the picture, once the paper was used in books, the actual book size was described by how many times the sheet used was subdivided, hence a crown sheet folded in half was a crown folio, down through quarto, octavo, hexadecimo (usually written 16mo. and 32mo.

All more or less forgotten nowadays. How much grander to order a quire of grand eagle.

 

Other examples online are approximately 14" by 11". The name of the company was "Double Elephant Folio & Quarto Co."; an ambitious name, but one that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what they produced.

 

Here's some info on the history of the illustrations Blake did for the book illustrating Robert Blair's poem "The Grave."

http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=butwba10

 

Very interesting! Lost until 2001.

I like that link. It answers several questions, including:

(The 13th plate being Schiavonetti's portrait of Blake.)