There are about 650 surviving blockbooks1. Of these, only a very small number are still in their original bookbindings. This is due to the growing awareness from the late 16th century onwards of the importance of blockbooks in the early history of printing. They were much sought after by collectors, especially the 18th– and 19th-century antiquarians and bibliophiles who paid increasingly high prices for them. Over the years, original bindings on blockbooks were removed and replaced with something “better”, often gold-tooled Morocco leather (goatskin), which was thought to be more befitting of their high status and value.
One of the few blockbooks still in its original binding is in the John Rylands Library. This wonderful volume in fact contains two separate blockbooks, which have been bound together (Figure 1).
The Apocalypse
The first blockbook in the volume is an Apocalypse (see my previous blog on a different copy of the Apocalypse in the John Rylands Library, which is the earliest surviving blockbook). This copy of the Apocalypse is in edition IV, which is thought to have been produced in Germany sometime between 1463 and 1467. Current research on this copy however, based on evidence from the paper on which it is printed, suggests that it does not date from later than around 1462/63 and may well be a year or two earlier than that.
It consists of 92 scenes on 48 double leaves, each double leaf printed from a single carved wooden block (24 blocks in total). It has been hand-coloured in green, yellow, orange, brown, and black (Figure 2).
Biblia Pauperum
The second blockbook in the volume is a Biblia pauperum (“Bible of the Poor” or “Pauper’s Bible”). Consisting of 40 leaves printed from 20 carved wooden blocks containing a complex cycle of biblical illustrations and text, it tells the story of the life of Christ and the Redemption of Man through a series of familiar scenes from the New Testament. The central scene on each page is flanked by images of related prophecies and prefigurations from the Old Testament, above and below which are figures of prophets and saints, with quotations from the prophets and other explanatory texts (Figure 3).
This copy of the Biblia pauperum is in edition III, which is thought to have been produced in the Netherlands sometime between 1460 and 1463. The chronology of the ten or eleven known blockbook editions of the Biblia pauperum is contested by scholars.
The Biblia pauperum was probably intended for an audience of poor clergymen or the educated laity who could not afford a complete Bible. It seems to have been used as an aid to personal devotions and as a teaching aid. With the stories and their illustrations already being very familiar to the devout, following the narrative content of the blockbook would have been straightforward for the semi-literate or for those who couldn’t read. The Biblia pauperum probably originated in the mid-13th century in Germany and circulated well into the late 15th century in manuscript, and from the 1460s typographically and as a blockbook. Its transmission ended in the first quarter of the 16th century.
The Binding
The book’s original owner was Ulrich Geislinger (died 1493), a Franciscan friar, lector of the convent in Ulm and later an auxiliary bishop in Augsburg, Germany. It was bound for him in 1467 by Johannes Richenbach (died 1486), a priest of the parish church in Geislingen an der Steige, near Ulm in the south of Germany, and who is perhaps the best-known German bookbinder of the 15th century. He used new techniques, tools and colour pigments to decorate his bindings. Richenbach is one of the few 15th-century bookbinders who we know the name of, simply because he signed and dated many of his bindings (Figure 4).
The binding is of pigskin over wooden boards. The front and rear covers have different blind-tooled designs, filled with multiple applications of individual tools (a star, a flower, a scroll, a chalice, a fleur-de-lis, etc.) to create the decoration. The front cover is lettered in black ‘Iste liber est f[rat]ris vlrici gyslinger lectoris i[n] vlma minor[um]’ (i.e. the name of the book’s owner) and the rear cover is lettered ‘P[er] me ioha[n]nem richenbach de gyslingen alligatus est ano d[omi]ni m.cccc.lxvii’ (i.e. the binder’s name and the date of binding 1467). Originally, there were four metal bosses on each cover and two metal clasps on the fore-edge, but these have been lost over time.
Only 58 or 59 Richenbach bindings survive. This one at the John Rylands Library is the only blockbook among them. It is remarkable that it is still intact.
The book has been fully digitised and can be viewed on Luna here and in the Early European Print collection on Manchester Digital Collections (2 Vols).
- According to the census of blockbooks published in the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Gutenberg-Museum in Mainz, 22 June-1 September 1991. Blockbucher des Mittelalters : Bilderfolgen als Lektuere. Mainz: Von Zabern, 1991. See: ‘Kurrzensus nach Standorten’, pp. 355-395. ↩︎
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