Principia typographica. The block-books, or xylographic delineations of scripture history; issued in Holland, Flanders and Germany, during the fifteenth century, exemplified and considered in connexion with the origin of printing. To which is added an attempt to elucidate the character of the paper-marks of the period
Samuel Leigh Sotheby's 1858 London study of fifteenth-century Netherlandish and German block-books, privately printed for bibliographers and historians of early printing, with facsimile tracings of the woodcut pages and watermarks. The plates reproduce outline woodcuts in paired arcaded compartments: crowned kings, armoured soldiers, angels on scrolls, walled towns, with banderoles and blackletter captions carrying the text.
