Remember Me! A New Years Gift or Christmas Present, 1825.

Small 8vo. London: I. Poole, [1824]. Small 8vo, xxiv, 372pp. With an engraved frontispiece, 4 full-page engravings including one by Blake, 8 hand-colored botanical plates, 8 plates of engraved music, a calendar with an engraved title-page and 6 plates, and 12 blank leaves titled "Album 1825" recorded by Keynes but not noted in other copies we have had. Publisher’s original full brown calf, central panels on both covers blind-stamped within a richly gilt border, backstrip with four raised bands, gilt-decorated, lettered REMEMBER ME, slightly scuffed and small black splotch (ink?) on lower cover, occasional small spots on plates as usual, a very good copy of a de luxe issue binding on the first of three editions of the book. § First edition, first issue of the book (no state variance in the plate), with a very early pencil inscription from one woman to another (illegible) repeated on the next leaf. One of the rarest of all of the plates designed and engraved by Blake. There was a reissue dated 1826 as part of the title, probably published late in 1825. 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. Bentley, BB, 490B. Easson and Essick, WBBI, Vol. I, XI (recording the Rosenwald proof and 3 copies). Keynes, Blake Studies, XIX (recording 7 variants but not mentioning the 1826 printing). Also see Bentley’s detailed essay and census of copies in “Remember Me! Customs and Costumes of Blake’s Gift Book,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 80.4 (fall 2011): 880-92. 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.”