an a color print be produced by printing a relief-etched plate two times, one impression over the other on the same sheet of paper? Yes. The authors have done it, but it requires behaving very differently from Blake: thoroughly wiping ink and colors between pulls, and either following guide lines four times per impression with extreme care and precision or using sheets longer than those we know he used. Even then, traces of the second printing are never completely erased. One does not need to resort to recreations, though, to make the case against the two-pull theory. Wiping ink and colors between pulls is inefficient, and we know from the visual evidence of the prints themselves that Blake did not do it. Nor did he employ the mechanism of bottom sheets necessary for dual registration. The white lines along the escarpments between relief plateaus and etched valleys indicate that color and ink were printed simultaneously. The two-pull theory requires us to believe the impossible, that the Blakes perfectly registered over 650 prints in 1794-96 while at the same time misaligning their plates relative to the edges of the paper. And it requires us to believe that Blake’s “skillful carelessness” was an inauthentic ploy to fool us by disguising his unsurpassed skill in the mechanics of registration. But the main reason for rejecting the two-pull theory is that modes of production may fall below the threshold of vision but cannot hide from magnification and computer enhancement.

Like old bones to the forensic scientist, prints give up their secrets if you know where and how to look. This is not a situation in which there is evidence on each side of the issue, nor is it a matter of textual interpretation in which the force of one’s rhetoric makes one view more persuasive than another. This is a matter of material facts and physical events. Either Blake used two-pull printing or he did not. All the material evidence indicates that he did not, with the single extant exception (“Nurses Song”) discussed in detail above. It is impossible for Blake to have regularly used two-pull printing.

Phillips has misread his key pieces of evidence and ignored, or rejected without explanation, what did not fit his theory, including published counter-arguments. The full evidence provided by Blake's techniques and the illuminated prints themselves does not support his interpretation. What goes unexplained in the two-pull theory is, however, easily explained by à la poupée printing without bottom sheets, the most direct contact Blake as artist could have had with the plate and image-making process. And this brings us to William of Occam’s famous razor: the simplest explanation is usually correct. We have found this principle an accurate guide in all our investigations of Blake’s graphic methods. The verbal content of Blake’s illuminated books is fearfully complex, but we cannot extrapolate from that observation that his graphic techniques must be equally complicated. For some modern commentators, the idea that illuminated printing was for Blake nearly as direct and autographic as writing and drawing on paper is somehow to underestimate his genius. It does not matter what Blake said of his technique in his 1793 prospectus “To The Public” (E 692-93) because it cannot be that simple and straightforward. The technique must be as intricate as his mythopoesis. But precision in line engraving and love of complex ideas do not automatically lead to precision in printing or love of mechanically registering one object to another. Advocating a very complex way to produce color prints may seem Blakean, but it is actually Urizenic and at the expense of the artist Blake.

To fail to believe that Blake color printed in a very complicated manner, Phillips argues, is to somehow diminish his skills as a printmaker. We argue just the opposite. We do Blake a great disservice by imagining him to be simply a better-than-average conventional printer obsessed with exacting and machine-like procedures when more efficient, direct, immediate, and artistically exciting ways of achieving the same results were available to him. Indeed, Blake’s color printing, even more than relief etching, fully realized Blake’s objective of combining in one seamless process printmaker, poet, and painter. Blake surely would have agreed with Hayter, who thought multiple-pull printing was “typical of the practice of a skilled artisan rather than a process by which the original thought of the artist becomes visible directly in a print” (59).

Moreover, we contend that the two-pull hypothesis is refuted by the fact that all of Blake’s color-printing effects can be produced in one pull, as the color printed facsimiles of “The Human Abstract” demonstrate (illus. 71, 72, 73), and by the inherent contradictions of the hypothesis. Blake’s very idea of prints, as reflected in his not producing correctly registered, similarly sized, uniformly legible, identical looking color and colored prints in large print runs, is evidence enough to indicate that Blake did not prize mathematical precision. Blake was forward looking—not to the mechanized color printing of the mid-nineteenth century, but rather to the monotypes, open-etched plates, multileveled printing, and painter-printmakers of the next two centuries. Indeed, Blake anticipates modern practices and ideas of the printmaker as artist. Both his writings and his graphic works indicate that Blake sought a more direct connection among thought, image, and object than was offered by reproduction, repetition, and replication.