William Blake

Apprentice and Master

Ashmolean Museum

2015   |  280 × 220mm   |  272pp

Distance and Proximity. Being based in Edinburgh, I am used to being many miles from my customers. I spend my working life staring at a computer, communicating by email, in a virtual world of acronyms: JPEG, PDF, FTP. In recent years I have worked on many catalogues for the Ashmolean Museum. It was only after five years that I went to Oxford and met anyone who worked there face to face. So it came as surprise to find out that the curator responsible for this major Blake exhibition was a Californian who had lived since the 1980s in a garret flat above the famous statue of Greyfriar’s Bobby in Edinburgh. So, for a change, the complex layout of this catalogue – where the illustrations and entries sit alongside a narrative text – was worked on with the author sitting alongside me.