Guided tours of Blake Cottage

Future displays

Blake’s craft and creative legacy

As we prepare Blake Cottage for public opening, two very different objects offer a glimpse of the experiences we hope to share: a replica printing press that brings Blake’s craft into focus, and Allen Ginsberg’s harmonium, connecting his poetry with a later generation of artists.

Both projects are still developing. The press is being constructed and the harmonium needs conservation; arrangements for their future display and use have yet to be finalised.

Allen Ginsberg’s wooden harmonium with keyboard, decorative fretwork and pedals.

Allen Ginsberg’s parlour organ

The American poet Allen Ginsberg found a lasting source of inspiration in William Blake. His musical settings of Songs of Innocence and of Experience gave Blake’s words a new voice, carrying them into the twentieth century’s poetry and music.

Ginsberg’s parlour organ, or harmonium, has now arrived safely from New York, a generous gift from the Allen Ginsberg Estate. We hope it will help visitors explore that creative connection. The instrument needs substantial work before it can be displayed or played, adding another conservation project to the Trust’s to-do list.

Allen Ginsberg’s harmonium, November 2026. Photograph © The Blake Cottage Trust.

Allen Ginsberg, wearing a crown, speaking into microphones after being crowned King of May in Prague on 1 May 1965.

Hear Ginsberg sing Blake

Ginsberg brought Blake’s poems to life through song. Explore his musical settings in The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience, available on Spotify.

Listen on Spotify →

Allen Ginsberg speaking after being crowned “King of May” in Prague, 1 May 1965. Credit: Engramma.it, no. 64 (August 2008), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0. Image reproduced without alteration.

Image source → · CC BY-SA 3.0 licence →

Replica printing press during assembly, with wooden rollers, frame and turned supports held by temporary straps.

A replica of Blake’s printing press

Blake was an engraver and printmaker as well as a poet and painter. A working replica press offers a way to explore the physical craft behind his printed images and words: the timber, rollers and carefully fitted parts that turn an idea into an impression on paper.

Josh Howard-Saunders of BLAM, furniture makers in Oxfordshire, is constructing the Trust’s replica. His workshop photographs follow its progress from shaped timber and traditional joints to the assembled frame. We hope the finished press will help bring this part of Blake’s creative life to visitors.

Press construction, 3 November 2026. Photograph supplied by Josh Howard-Saunders. © The Blake Cottage Trust.

Completed wooden star-wheel rolling press made by Josh Howard-Saunders with Michael Phillips for the Ashmolean’s 2014–15 Blake exhibition, with printing bed, rollers and large spoked wheel.

An earlier press for the Ashmolean

This completed star-wheel rolling press shows what the craft can produce. Josh Howard-Saunders of BLAM made it in collaboration with Blake scholar and printmaker Dr Michael Phillips for the reconstructed Lambeth studio in the Ashmolean Museum’s William Blake: Apprentice and Master exhibition (4 December 2014–1 March 2015).

After the exhibition it was installed at Christ Church, Oxford; Rice University acquired it in 2023. It is an earlier replica, separate from the new press Josh is now constructing for The Blake Cottage Trust.

About the Ashmolean exhibition →

Earlier replica press made for the Ashmolean exhibition, 2014–15. Image source: Rice University News, 22 February 2023 (credited there as “Submitted photo”).

Read the press’s later history →