The Introduction explores how Blake’s deconstruction of representational presencing differs from Derrida’s by reconstituting speech as subvocal audition by way of Hartleyan association of ideas. Blake took the Bible’s “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1) to signify the homonymy between names and ideas, between language and thought, which cannot be spoken but is nonetheless audible inwardly as self-awareness. I propose a study of the theory and philosophy of reading that underpins his work. Illuminated printing enabled Blake to perform instantiations of a process skilled readers habitually overlook—namely, the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion that is basic to the process of learning how to read, whereby orthographic symbols become transduced into units in a language’s sound system such that seen writing turns into meaningful mental sounds.