#wood cuts

Biblia Pauperum-(very) Early modern printing press(7/?)

This Biblia Pauperum (Bible of the poor) is a beautiful example of a block book, or a xylographica. These are short books printed mainly in the second half of the 15th century in Europe. These are woodcuts with blocks carved to include both text and illustrations. Because these woodcuts are so labour intensive and difficult to produce (imagine carving this out of a piece of wood!), these block books are often quite short. Most block books date from around the same time as the typeset book (Gutenberg’s invention) and were a cheaper alternative. Single leaf woodcuts were already a few decades more popular.

ABiblia pauperum was a tradition of Bible pictures, it illustrated the typological correspondences between the Old and New Testaments. These Biblia pauperum put more importance on the images than on the text. This one dates back from 1460-1470.