Biblia Pauperum. Reproduced in facsimile from one of the copies in the British Museum, with an historical and bibliographical introduction, by J. Ph. Berjeau.

London: John Russell Smith, 1859 One of 250 copies. An excellent facsimile of Schreiber I, the first edition of the most popular and best known of block book texts, published in the Netherlands around 1466-70. There are nine known complete or partially complete copies of this edition. . Publisher's brown morocco over marbled boards. . Tall folio. Spine, corners, board edges rubbed, intermittent light foxing. A good, sound copy. Block books or xylographica were for a long time believed to precede printing from moveable type, invented by Gutenberg in the 1450s. Their crude appearance and the style of the woodcuts suggest an earlier date. But Allan H. Stevenson, writing in the 1960s, concluded from a study of the watermarks, that nearly all of them date from the 1460s or later. He did, however, establish the date for the earliest one, the Netherlandish Apocalypse as c. 1451-52. The latest block books, according to Stevenson, can be dated up to around 1530. (See "The Problem of Blockbooks" in Blockbücher des Mittelalters, Mainz: 1991, pp. 229-262). The woodcuts may simply have been copied from an older style. The majority of the surviving block books were printed in German, Dutch or Latin. The centers of block book production appear to have been in the Netherlands and the south of Germany. The first half dozen editions of the Biblia Pauperum are all Dutch. Each group of images in the Biblia Pauperum deals with one event from the Gospels, which is accompanied by two smaller images depicting Old Testament events which prefigure the larger image. The parallels are explained in two blocks of text, and each of the three Biblical themes is introduced with a Latin verse. Above and below these panels are figures of saints with banners of text beneath them.