Based on a copy in the collection of the Huntington Library that shows how Blake used coloring style and pen and ink additions to make a unified book out of fifty-four individual engravings.Based on digital photography, this book also captures the designs and coloring closely. It explores the political and historical contexts of the poems.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience are Blake's most familiar poems. A few examples, such as "The Tyger" and "The Chimney Sweeper," frequently appear in anthologies of English literature, in which the poems are often printed without Blake's evocative engravings. But Blake made collections of his Songs, first the Innocence group alone in 1789, and then Experience in 1794, combining the two in that year to make up a single volume.