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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the materials the poet William Blake used in creating his copper plates for "Songs of Innocence and of Experience," "America," "Europe," "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise," and "Jerusalem." The article discusses who made the copper plates, how they were used, the printing process and the cost to Blake, as well as why they are now largely lost.

Male friendship, as a motif, pervades John Dryden's works. Through it he confronts problems of stability and continuity that he would ameliorate by means of his poetic powers and the revered institutions behind them. The sexual element of the relationships, which critics invariably treat anachronistically, is crucial to the succour Dryden finds in them. It derives from the traditions he evokes—real or imagined—of male aristocratic bonds (in which the poet has a share) that he revivified in order to negotiate contemporary politics and curtail the disintegration, as he perceived it, of the monarchy. The problem for Dryden and his contemporaries lay in manipulating existing paradigms in the face of Charles II's profligacy and its attendant chaos, the increase in popular power in the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. For Dryden, who closely associated poetic and monarchic continuity, the bonds he presented and the institution they perpetuated offered a fortifying power in the face of assaults upon sacrosanct traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]