Block book

Single-leaf woodcuts from the preceding decades often included passages of text with prayers, indulgences and other material; the block book was an extension of this form.

Block books were almost exclusively "devoted to the propagation of the faith through pictures and text" and "interpreted events drawn from the Bible or other sources in medieval religious thought.

[3] The earlier block books were printed on only one side of the paper (anopisthographic), using a brown or grey, water based ink.

The use of woodcut blocks to print block books had been used by the Chinese and other East Asian cultures for centuries to print books, but it is generally believed that the European development of the technique was not directly inspired by Asian examples, but instead grew out of the single woodcut, which itself developed from block-printing on textiles.

In part because of their sometimes crude appearance, it was generally believed that block books dated to the first half of the 15th century and were precursors to printing by movable metal type, invented by Gutenberg in the early 1450s.

[7] Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber, a leading nineteenth-century scholar of block books, concluded that none of the surviving copies could be dated before 1455-60.

[10] Most of the earlier block books are believed to have been printed in the Netherlands, and later ones in Southern Germany, likely in Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, and Schwaben, among a few other locales.

[12] However, a small number of texts were very popular and together account for the great majority of surviving copies of block books.

The following institutions have important collections of block-books (the number of examples includes fragments or even single leaves and is taken from Sabine Mertens et al., Blockbücher des Mittelalters, 1991, pp.