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Blast 1 was edited and largely written by Wyndham Lewis with contributions from Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein, Spencer Gore, Wadsworth, and Rebecca West and included an extract from Ford Madox Hueffer's novel The Saddest Story, better known by its later title The Good Soldier (published under his subsequent pseudonym, Ford Madox Ford). The first edition was printed in folio format, with the oblique title Blast splashed across its bright pink soft cover. Inside, Lewis used a range of bold typographic innovations to engage the reader, that are reminiscent of Marinetti's contemporary concrete poetry such as Zang Tumb Tumb. Rather than conventional serif fonts, some of the text is set in sans-serif "grotesque" fonts.
The opening twenty pages of Blast 1 contain the Vorticist manifesto, written by Lewis and signed by him, Wadsworth, Pound, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Epstein chose not to sign the manifesto, although his work was featured. There is also a (positive) critique of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual In Art, a faintly patronising exhortation to suffragettes not to destroy works of art, a review of a London exhibition of Expressionist woodcuts, and a last dig at Marinetti by Wyndham Lewis:
Futurism, as preached by Marinetti, is largely Impressionism up-to-date. To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt. With a lot of good sense and vitality at his disposal, he hammers away in the blatant mechanism of his Manifestos, at his idee fixe of Modernity.
The manifesto is primarily a long list of things to be 'Blessed' or 'Blasted'. It starts:
1.Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves.
2.We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes.
3.We discharge ourselves on both sides.
4.We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours.
5.Mercenaries were always the best troops.
6.We are primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World.
7.Our Cause is NO-MAN'S.
8.We set Humour at Humour's throat. Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes.
9.We only want Humour if it has fought like Tragedy.
10.We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb.
The subjects either 'Blasted' or 'Blessed' depended on how they were seen by the fledgling Vorticists. Among them were the leaders of the rival avant-garde grouped about Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury set, as well as the literary leaders of the past. Thus the "Purgatory of Putney" is named for being the place to which Algernon Swinburne had retired into respectability. Among the Blessed are seafarers because "they exchange...one element for another" (p.22) and the hairdresser who "attacks Mother Nature for a small fee....[and] trims aimless and retrograde growths" (p.25). Henry Tonks, the Slade Professor of Fine Art, had the unique honour of being both 'Blessed' and 'Blasted'.
The first edition also contained many illustrations in the Vorticist style by Jacob Epstein, Edward Wadsworth, Lewis and others.
The second edition, published on 20 July 1915, contained a short play by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot's poems Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Another article by Gaudier-Brzeska entitled Vortex (written from the Trenches) further described the vorticist aesthetic. It was written whilst Gaudier-Brzeska was fighting in the First World War, a few weeks before he was killed there.
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