Writing to a friend in early 1796, Ann Flaxman praised William Blake's latest endeavour, a set of illustrations for Richard Edwards's edition of Edward Young's Night Thoughts: ‘Edwards has inserted the letter press close cut of Youngs Night Thinto large Margins making a folio size this a friend of ours is ornamenting with most beautiful designs in water colours.’ In a later letter Ann commented that Blake ‘has treated his Poet most Poetically – Flaxman has employ'd him to Illuminate the works of Grey for my Library’. Working on a copy of John Murray's 1790 edition of Gray, Blake adopted the same technique of extra-illustration he had employed on the working copy of Young's Night Thoughts. On the expanded margins of the folio, a naked youth soars out of the book riding a swan upwards ‘through the azure deep of air’ (see Figure 10.1). Tipped onto the illustration slightly off-centre, the book's title page covers part of the swan's wing and the left part of the youth's bottom. This interruption of form conveys dynamism to a flight that seems to originate from within the book and extend beyond the limits of the page. The wider folio margins revoke the title-page's function as the book's boundary. The impression of a continuous deep sky painted in the book's expanded margins blurs the distinction between the world of the poems and the world of the reader.