Definition of term:: Blockbook

• "Blockbooks, or xylographica, as produced in Europe – usually with more illustrations than text, often hand-coloured, and mostly of a popular and/or religious character – were long supposed to have preceded the invention of printing from movable metal types (by Johann Gutenberg, c. 1440–50). In the last thirty or forty years, however, research, much of it conducted by the late Allan Stevenson, into the paper of surviving copies, has established that (despite the solitary example of the unique Apocalypse I in the Rylands Library, which he dated c. 1451) the heyday of the blockbook was in fact the 1460s, to which the early and famous examples – whether Apocalypse, Biblia Pauperum, Arts Moriendi, Cantica Canticorum or Speculum Humani Salvationis – have been proved to belong. Many others, mostly of lower price and quality, belong to the 1470s, while isolated specimens continued to appear up to c. 1500. The blockbook was essentially a picture book, the illustration and its accompanying text being cut with the knife on wood and printed on one side of the paper only. They were often, perhaps normally, impressed from two-page blocks reaching across the sheet, in a brownish or greyish water-based ink (only from c. 1470 was oil-based ink generally used, thus allowing printing on both sides of the leaf). Examples are nowadays of extreme rarity, cost a great deal of money, and will be beyond the horizon of most collectors." (Carter, ABC for Book Collectors)