Remember Me! A New Years Gift or Christmas Present, 1825. by Blake, William - [1824]

Small 8vo. London: I. Poole, [1824]. Small 8vo, xxiv, 372 pp. With an engraved frontispiece, 4 full-page engravings including one by Blake, 8 hand-colored botanical plates, 8 plates of engraved music, and a calendar with an engraved title-page and 6 plates. Publisher’s de luxe original full brown polished calf, covers panelled in gilt, backstrip richly gilt-panelled with the binder’s name at the foot of the spine “Purgold”, slightly worn, occasional small spots on plates as usual, a very good copy of the de luxe issue. [frontispiece "A Tribute of Regard..."; Title-page "Remember Me" etc. with no date beneath "Christmas Present" (looks like it was carefully erased); Contents and introduction [i] ii-xxiv; plate "Her screams aroused her servant"; [1] 2-336; 361-362; [365]--372pp.; 8 pp. of engraved music at the end. With the Blake plate at p. 32, and color plates at 42, 73, 88, 89, 95, 148, 149, 275 (b/w The Storm), and 326 (color).] § First edition of one of the rarest of all of the plates designed and engraved by Blake. The title exists in three states: dated 1825, dated 1826, and with the date on the title removed -- only one other copy thus is known. Three copies in all have been sold in the last 30 years: Sotheby's Belgravia, 3 Feb. 1976, lot 3, Sotheby's London, 6 June 1991, lot 97, and a copy sold privately by Maggs Bros. to Robert N. Essick replacing this copy from Essick purchased at the 1976 sale. The plate, titled ‘The Hiding of Moses’ was the last plate designed and engraved by Blake himself for a commercial publication; the original drawing ‘Moses placed in the Ark of Bulrushes’, which closely echoes a tempera now untraced that was executed some 25 years earlier, is in the Huntington Library. BB #490A. Easson and Essick, William Blake Book Illustrator, XI (recording the Rosenwald proof and 3 copies). Bentley (in the U of T Quarterly 2011) noted: “The gift book Remember Me! with Blake's wonderful engraving of the ‘Hiding of Moses’ was more remarkable for its decorations than for its literary contents. Of the twenty-four copies recorded, each differs from the others in the pattern of binding, colour of fore-edges, endpapers, and the decorated sleeve-case. Despite this varied elegance, the work had only a modest sale, and the same sheets were re-issued in 1825 for the 1826 gift-giving season. This paucity of sales may be related to the fact that the publisher John Poole had little experience of book distribution. His speciality was as a maker of Marble Paper and Fancy Pocket-Books, not in selling them.”