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 Dutch, Flemish and German block-books, privately printed for bibliographers and historians of early printing. Facsimiles reproduce woodcut scripture scenes in heavy outline: Annunciations, deathbeds and Last Judgments framed by arcades, crowded with prophets holding curling banderoles of blackletter text, plus pages of watermark tracings.
