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
A three-volume bibliographical study by auctioneer and book scholar Samuel Leigh Sotheby, printed in London in 1858 for collectors and historians of fifteenth-century Dutch, Flemish and German block-books, with a long appendix cataloguing the paper-marks of the period. The plates are grids of outline line drawings tracing watermarks—gothic letters, crosses, fleurs-de-lis, oxheads, unicorns, stags, shields and bells—each boxed and captioned with reference numbers, offering designers a stock of simple linear emblems and a ruled tabular layout.
